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Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

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721 points hhs | 3 comments | 16 Apr 20 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.672s | source
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fbelzile ◴[16 Apr 20 15:28 UTC] No.22890386[source]▶
I'm very happy with Stripe and for their success, but I plan on switching all my payments to go through PayPal again. I did some math and PayPal offers a better deal for Canadian businesses after Stripe bumps me off of their grandfathered conversion fees in a couple months.

I love the slick interface, but it's simply not worth the thousands per year I'll be saving with the switch.

For me the main selling point for any payment processor is the minimization of fees. Sure, the API's are nice, but I already use a payment gateway for that.

I'm a few clicks away from saving thousands. Am I missing anything?

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nickjj ◴[16 Apr 20 15:36 UTC] No.22890465[source]▶
Are you planning to go through PayPal directly or Braintree?

One thing I notice is, I get much less fraudulent payments through PayPal, and when I do get them it's handled automatically (and most of the time they end up being not fraud because PayPal investigated it and released the funds). 100% hands free, $0 in fees.

With Stripe, not only do I get more fraudulent payments but you need to pay $15 as a dispute fee through Stripe when you lose the case and pretty much all fraud causes through Stripe will be lost (because it's actual fraud). It also takes like 20 minutes to fill out the forms, create fax-compatible sized screenshots and a lot of other boilerplate information if you plan to contest the dispute.

It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only get it if you pay insurance fees, which are added fees on top of the normal amount.

Combine that with the new Stripe SCA compatible APIs and sketchy docs and yeah I'm in the same boat as you. Stripe is no longer an immediate "of course I'm going to use Stripe" decision. Braintree is looking pretty good at this point.

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csdreamer7 ◴[16 Apr 20 16:50 UTC] No.22891254[source]▶
Would you mind sharing your percentage of fraud with the two services? (I assume you are using Braintree.)

Honestly, you are the first person to make a good case on using PayPal over Stripe. Especially with the arbitrary horror stories I hear about PayPal all the time.

> It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only get it if you pay insurance fees, which are added fees on top of the normal amount.

I agree. This should be standard.

> Combine that with the new Stripe SCA compatible APIs and sketchy docs

Would you please describe what is sketchy? Their docs seem pretty good... but I am now just hearing about SCA.

https://stripe.com/guides/strong-customer-authentication

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1. chrischen ◴[16 Apr 20 18:13 UTC] No.22891990[source]▶
I agree with the poster that in our own numbers we see almost 0% chargebacks on Paypal vs almost regular occurrences on Stripe (via credit card).

Even in the rare instances where a chargeback or dispute happens PayPal has never failed to side with us or otherwise cover it under seller protection. And this is all done at the same fee levels as Stripe.

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2. teruakohatu ◴[17 Apr 20 04:02 UTC] No.22896082[source]▶
That is interesting because I have never had a problem getting a refund from PayPal, with one exception notable exception. I assumed they always sided with the buyers.

In the one exception the seller had proof of delivery, yet it was not possible to have been delivered that day because of a road closure. PayPal sided with the seller. A year later out of the blue, with no prior communication, the seller sends me a full refund and said the package was returned by the delivery company. No idea where it has been sitting for about a year before being returned.

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3. chrischen ◴[17 Apr 20 06:53 UTC] No.22896816[source]▶
PayPal also happens to have a return shipping protection for buyers, which covers the return shipping costs even when the merchant does not.

You're probably referring to PayPal disputes, but PayPal also covers merchants from chargebacks (even if the chargebacks themselves are won by the buyer), when a physical product is shipped.

So it seems like they must eat a lot of the fees because in the case of the credit card dispute PayPal is eating the charge if they do Seller Protection.

Somehow they do all this while offering standard credit card rates, so I think they're heavily undervalued by startups.