Summary: Stripe put my accounts in review for a spike in sales on Cyber Monday. Throughout the month we received very little communication from Stripe and had many support chats and calls. Keep in mind that the whole time Stripe was still accepting payments on our behalf on all of these accounts. Each of the chats/calls asked us to upload the same invoices each time for review and gave us vague information that our accounts were being reviewed. Finally out of frustration I posted on HN about my issue. Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.
Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.
Stripe you can do better. We all know that in order to scale you need to automate pieces of your infrastructure and communication. But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.
See my comments below for actual details and dates.
Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna.
What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent?
(can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)
Yes, there are quite a few of them. For smaller sums KYC is usually not needed. No exchange needed either - as a customer you just send crypto to the payment address they give you, and as a merchant you receive your funds (minus some fee) in either fiat or crypto. No exchange needed in either case. As a merchant you obviously need to do KYC regardless of the amount received.
I know of Bitpay and ForumPay, but there are others too.
EDIT: depending on the currency the blockchain fees can be very low (or very high), so it pays to do your homework.
No, you can't because there's no dollars on the blockchain, only varying degrees of unregistered and unregulated money market fund ranging from something fairly reasonable (USDC) to the Reserve Primary Fund that broke the buck in 2008 (USDT, UST).
To send dollars you have to go through an exchange - well two, actually.
BitPay is an exchange. They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money. This is the point where you'd run into AML/KYC/etc issues. Getting money on and off exposes you to massive counterparty risk that could just leave you a creditor in the Bahamas.
You have to combine blockchain fees, exchange fees, forex risk, counter-party risk and legal/compliance risk - plus all blockchain transactions have to be reported with their cost basis on your taxes. If you're trying to do it 'right' you will pay wildly more for anything on the blockchain because decentralization is significantly less efficient.
EDIT: I won't be dragged into discussion about crypto. GGP asked about option, I gave one. Do your homework and don't believe random HN posters (which goes for both of us). Over and out.
> They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money.
Did I misunderstand? If so, my bad.
[edit] BitPay is actually fascinating because they publish their merchant breakdown, or at least they used to. It's overwhelmingly all prepaid gift cards, "internet" and VPN. And the share has shifted more and more towards prepaid gift cards. [1]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1142527/bitpay-payments-...