Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I've Made to Date

Initially I misread the title - I thought it was a mistake to move to Stripe.

This author understands that PayPal offers this service, but does not explain why, despite seemingly being positive about their past experiences with PayPal, they opted for Stripe instead; the factors they actually considered would have been very interesting: without it the article lacks.<p>I am also curious why their list of alternatives was so short... no Chase Paymentech? no Litle &#38; Co? There are numerous players in this space that handle large clients, not just the three being compared here. The article only states that they did research, and ended up with that list. :(

Really quickly, this guy has clearly not researched the field. We (I do contract work for a large e-commerce business that does 8 figures USD a month and have a side recurring saas company that will do 5 figures a month in Jan). We looked at Litle, Braintree, Stripe, and Samurai. We quickly eliminated Stripe because it's expensive and then had an RFP for the other guys. For my contract job, Samurai ended up winning out over Litle and Braintree (Ended up being between Litle and Samurai in the end). I can't recommend the FeeFighters guys highly enough... I worked with them on my contract gig and ended up using them for my side project too. They have a fantastic API - <a href="http://samurai.feefighters.com/developers" rel="nofollow">http://samurai.feefighters.com/developers</a> and were just great to work with. For my contract job (big bureaucratic company) we just tokenized ~a million credit cards with them and have shifted about half of our transactions that way.<p>Stripe is <i>way</i> better than paypal. It is also <i>really</i> expensive. Unless you are a hobby website, I wouldn't give it much thought, except for something to grow up out of. For real businesses, I think the flexibility afforded by a real merchant account plus gateway (Braintree, Litle, or Samurai) is worth a lot.

Seems odd these two Stripe stories get frontpaged back to back.

I just went to the CloudContacts order page and seeing that I type my credit card info straight on that page scared me. I'm pretty sure it's because I'm an engineer but even if it said "Powered by Stripe", I'd still be suspicious...<p>I was really hoping I wouldn't react that way because I like what Stripe is doing.

This part is true for my site as well:<p>&#62; What I found was that a number of customers filled &#62; in our order form, went off to Paypal or Google &#62; Checkout, but never completed the order.<p>On my site, I've made all the numbers public. Over the last 6 months, roughly 25% of people start questions, but then don't pay.<p>Compare these 2 charts. The first shows the number of paid questions per week:<p><a href="http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyQuestionsPerWeek" rel="nofollow">http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyQuestionsPerWeek</a><p>and this shows the questions that people started but then never paid for:<p><a href="http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyUnpaidQuestionsPerWeek" rel="nofollow">http://www.wpquestions.com/charts/howManyUnpaidQuestionsPerW...</a><p>I'm guessing that the numbers would improve if we weren't using PayPal, so next week I'm planning to try to use Stripe.<p>However, I am sad to say, for making payments I am still stuck with PayPal for awhile, as I can not see anything else that is so easy. On any given day my website gets something like $70 and pays out something like $50. Right now I've a cron job that runs once a night and which pays everyone who is owed money from my PayPal account. But the payments are usually small. On a normal night, at 3 AM EST, my PayPal account makes payments that might look like this:<p>$24<p>$14<p>$12<p>$9<p>$7<p>$7<p>$5<p>$4<p>$4<p>$3<p>$3<p>$3<p>$2<p>$2<p>$2<p>$2<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>$1<p>I use the PayPal MassPay API. I've looked into other services for sending payments, such as Payoneer, but none have such wide acceptance as PayPal.<p>Any suggestions for sending automated payments, other than PayPal?

On this order page, the "Confirm My Order" button just seems weird:<p><a href="https://www.cloudcontacts.com/order" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudcontacts.com/order</a><p>Does pressing the button confirm the order, or does pressing the button take you to a page where you confirm the order?

OK, I'm pretty sure this is an FAQ but not getting a sensible result from google: Does anyone have a pointer to a table of processing fees for the major providers?

$15 dollar for every occuring charge-back nomatter what the outcome? Not thanks.

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