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...
However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you.
EDIT: This seems to have sparked some confusion. I'm not saying Germans don't do card payments, I was only speaking of credit cards. We do all have and use debit cards, however, those are of a national scheme with wonderfully low fees, but no online usability.
The interesting thing however, we A/B tested with and without SEPA and basically saw no difference. Only German people used it, but when it wasn’t available they managed to find a credit card or use PayPal.
I’d love it if banks were making instant payments simple and verifiable, but SEPA feels like something from the 70s to me.
These concerns still apply to direct debits, unfortunately. The reason being that there's barely any authorization for direct debits, you just need the bank account number and name. Isn't the situation somewhat similar to CC transactions without 3D Secure/whatever it's called? I seems to recall reading in my bank's terms that I can chargeback transactions for something crazy like a year. You always need a "mandate" to debit an account and if you get that properly signed by the customer, you should be able to get the bank to reverse the reversal, but I can appreciate the bureaucratic overhead.
I was only offering it as a potential solution if getting people to sign up is genuinely difficult.
The thing with PayPal is: they offer direct debit to customers and I'm assuming that's how most people who would've otherwise used direct debit directly with you ended up paying. It is my understanding that PayPal is also aware of the risks associated with this and offers merchants the option not to accept payments through it. I can't seem to find an article just now, but I remember instances where PayPal told me something along the lines of "this merchant does not accept payments via direct debit, please use a credit card instead". I can only assume this is because they at least partially pass on the risk.
That's unfortunately not true. There is no recourse to direct debit returns; there is no dispute resolution process or anything like that. The presence or absence of a mandate only impacts the timeframe for returns to be files, as far as I understand.