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...
We charge in USD because we serve primarily US customers.
I pay for the business expenses in USD.
I've opened a US/USD bank account with Transferwise.
But I can't use it with Stripe [1]. Their only choice is to have them convert our USD earnings to AUD and pay out to an AUD bank account.
So when I pay those business expenses, I'm either:
a) paying on an Australian debit or credit card, which charge us another 3% for every international transaction (3% seems to be the standard rate across all of our banks here), or
b) carefully managing our cash flow to transfer AUD to our Transferwise account, use TW to exchange to USD, and then pay with our TW card.
We did (a) for a while, now trying (b), but I'd love to see (c): Stripe pays our USD earnings to our USD bank account.
[1] Funnily/strangely enough, I can actually ADD the USD bank account to our Stripe account. It just sits there, lonely, with a 0.00 USD balance. It took reading through the docs to realise that USD payouts are not supported for Australian Stripe accounts.