That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s).
As always, thank you to the many HNers who are also active Stripe users!
1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it.
2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transactions in the EU, where most of our customers are. Instead, because we're selling from Australia, we get charged 2.9% for some arbitrary reason. This coupled with 1) puts our all-in transaction fees at 5%+ :(
3) I think billing the vendor for refund fees is a really retrograde step - it increases friction in the decision for us when a customer asks for a refund, and industry wide is going to cause less happy customers and less card users online. It's already hard enough convincing Dutch/German customers to use a credit card online.
If any non-EU companies know a cheaper way to process transactions in the EU, I'm all ears...
On (1), we started an FX team this year. (There are a lot of legal complexities here around how the funds move, who has title to what at which moment, and so on.) But we're investing significantly in improving it and it should get better soon. On (2), the core issue is card network pricing rules -- by design, they discriminate on the basis of where the business is located. We happily extend EU fees to all EU legal entities, however, and would be happy to work with you to set that up. On (3), refunds aren't free for Stripe, and we were previously in a position where businesses with a lot of refunds were being subsidized by those who didn't. We want to give this margin away more sensibly.
Still, all the issues you bring up are real and I'd like us to find better solutions.
I understand they're not free, but I also understand Stripe does get a considerable portion back that they are no longer passing on?
Couldn't this just have been applied to the problematic businesses then rather than all?
In our analysis in making this change, we saw that this simply makes little difference for the vast majority of businesses. For example, if you're processing $100k/year and refund 5% of your payments (which would be on the high end of normal), it works out to about $12/month.
While refund rate of course is not definitively coupled to the quality of a business, we do see across our portfolio that it is strongly correlated. Given a basket of possible fees (for example, higher fees on Amex, which most other providers have), we prefer the fees that, on the margin, are least consequential for the businesses that are doing the best job of serving their customers.
Having said all of that, none of our pricing is cast in stone, and we always genuinely appreciate feedback, including contrary views.
Stripe has made the right call here - though the silent and vast majority won't have anything to complain about so won't be on here posting.
Do you know how often I have people buy something and then call me only to let me know they may have bought the wrong thing?
If you ISL6258AHRTZ & ISL6259AHRTZ, your refunds are likely not due to "business quality."
If you sell NXP610A3B and NXP1608, your refunds likely don't "business quality."
They reflect reality in a world where most people aren't savants with random long strings of seemingly meaningless letters/numbers that make up product codes for chipsets.
I used to employ a competitor in this field. We have taken different approaches to obtaining customers, and in setting up our respective online stores to be as simple as possible - to try and inform people what fits what even if they don't know what they are doing.
But lots of people don't read, then they buy things by mistake anyway.
>While refund rate of course is not definitively coupled to the quality of a business, we do see across our portfolio that it is strongly correlated. Given a basket of possible fees (for example, higher fees on Amex, which most other providers have), we prefer the fees that, on the margin, are least consequential for the businesses that are doing the best job of serving their customers.
What metrics are being used here to judge the quality of a business? How is whether a business is "quality" or not being judged by a credit card processing provider? What information is obtained to make judgments according to these metrics?
I've been in different online and in-person businesses. Some businesses have low refund rate with poor quality, others high refund rate with fine quality. I can say with certainty 100% of the refunds I gave when people sent back a product that was not the product I sent them(or even a product I sell) after they filed a chargeback had nothing to do with the quality of our business - the only thing the merchant would have access to is a he-said-she-said list of jpg files and ranting paragraphs. Hardly fitting information to judge the quality of a business on.
Honestly, I've looked as Stripe's offerings - I pay 2.15% right now with 40/60 online card not present/in-store card present and refunds are free. How is it with a 2.9% fee that people who rarely refund their customers have to pay the fee for those customers for the model to make sense? I'm not asking Stripe to match the fee of a large bank - but can we not charge an additional .7 percent and then say "it has to be done so we don't lose when people refund?"
This is outside the greater implications of this policy - if more merchant services take this on, we will be left with a world where only Amazon, eBay, and Walmart can offer "cancel" buttons on their site. Who will want to do business with small businesses if even something as basic as hitting the cancel button incurs fees?
If I buy a TV, or an ultrasonic cleaner, or a stereo, or some furniture from a small business vs amazon and I mess up something in my order, I have to pay a $45 fee - but when I buy it from amazon, I don't? Screw them, I'll use amazon.
If this is adopted by every single business, it will be just one of many factors that pushes customers in the direction of using Amazon over small businesses. It's hard enough competing with trillion dollar companies as is without erroneous fees being added in that were outside the overton window of business discussion 10 years ago.
To be clear, I have no problem with people choosing to make purchases from Amazon. I do have an issue with the industry slowly adding barriers to small businesses having the ability to compete on a level playing field. I'm all for them earning a good reputation, but we shouldn't be working to put sour tastes in the mouths of every customer who f'd up and made an order in error with someone that they will not have with a larger company.
> They reflect reality in a world where most people aren't savants with random long strings of seemingly meaningless letters/numbers that make up product codes for chipsets.
If you're selling products to people who aren't intimate enough with the product to tell them apart, and not doing a good enough job of guiding them before they put down their hard earned money, you're failing your customers. So it is very tied to business quality.
You should have warnings, or clear break downs of product descriptions they can use to confirm.
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A refund is not free for the user either, now they have to go and get a refund, hope they caught it quick enough for shipping, maybe ship it back.
So there is, almost by definition, no situation where you have a high refund rate, and aren't making your customers suffer, and that's not how a quality business is run