I know that PayPal is always trashed for various reasons and rightfully so, but one thing the new (or fairly new) players like Stripe haven't gotten right is fraud detection. PayPal still rules when it comes to chargebacks, Merchant protection (if you follow their protocols correctly, eg. don't sell guns, illegal stuff and read their documentation thoroughly which requires you to do some API calls to enable merchant protection) you're pretty much safe. The same isn't the experience with Stripe.
I, as a developer myself find it incredibly easy to put together something with Stripe in just a matter of few hours with Stripe vs PayPal. But, have you ever experienced a fraudulent case with Stripe? Stripe will almost always side with the customer even though you have evidence to prove you were the one scammed. I hope you never have to experience what it is like because you can't even get hold of someone over the phone when that happens.
But, as much as I hate PayPal like you, I can tell you, there were many many incidents where I got stuck with their sh*tty documentation and I was able to get hold of someone from their developer team. There were many instances where I was able to successfully win chargebacks against fraudsters by getting hold of someone on the phone and explaining the situation. Stripe simply isn't there yet, and this is one of the most important elements in this business, not just the fancy integration and documentation.
It's not Stripe's fault though, I opine that they simply don't have enough data as PayPal does to detect/prevent fraud as good as PayPal.
I can confirm that it's very hard to win a dispute if using Stripe as a merchant with a card-not-present transaction. However...my experience has been that's true of all payment processors, including Paypal, and I have heard a lot of horror stories about Paypal in specific.
> Stripe will almost always side with the customer even though you have evidence to prove you were the one scammed. I hope you never have to experience what it is like because you can't even get hold of someone over the phone when that happens.
There are hundreds if not thousands of stories of people having this issue with Paypal, so... :)
> For example, Paypal's seller protection explicitly does not cover you as a seller if the buyer claims the item was not as described
My experience (I sell Bamboo chairs, ha!) is that if you can prove you have a detailed description of the item in place that specifies what is included, what isn't, what's the color, texture and everything else in sufficient detail, you can win the case. In my case I do all that plus I display my terms and conditions during checkout, so there were maybe 3 times this happened to me and I won all of these cases.
Easiest way to avoid this? Block payments/checkouts from demographics notorious of these practices - China, Pakistan, Africa, Egypt, etc. Your demographics may vary though, based on your product, your target audience, etc. Use your analytics systems to find out which ones give you a lot of high pageviews:bounce ratio and block them, especially if there are suspicious orders from them (10000 orders of a toothbrush without any prior emails, etc for example).
I use my own e-commerce platform (because Shopify sucks) to detect and trigger fraud systems. If something looks like even a 10% suspicious transaction to me, it will be flagged and pass through a manual order fulfilment. I know, I make it sound so easy, but this will probably take you atleast half a year to fine tune and you should be good.
> There are hundreds if not thousands of stories of people having this issue with Paypal, so... :)
Once again, I'm not siding with PayPal, but I think this could be because they've been much longer in the business than Stripe?
Can attest that this is sound advice. I really like Paypal (though I readily admit they are often a bad corporate actor) but I just wish their fees weren't so ridiculous.
Sure, but compare Braintree related HN posts to Stripe related HN posts. Something is missing.
Edit: Guess my feel that HN posts might be correlated to innovation is off? As far as I can tell, Stripe is kicking Braintree’s ass. PayPal has good market share as a whole, because it is a second form of payment. Ignore that and look at basic CC payments only, and Stripe is clearly beating Braintree in market share. Basically...what did PayPal net from this acquisition?
I've used Braintree extensively (and have limited experience with Stripe).
Braintree has been an absolute pleasure to develop with. Their support has been excellent, we even had a conference call with their dev team in Australia regarding a new feature that they were rolling out so that we could be an early adopter.
HN gets all giddy and excited about Stripe for some reason, but Braintree is just as nice and easy to use. Stripe doesn't have anything inherently better than BT.
I built one small web-app that required payment processing. I tried out both Stripe and Braintree and actually wound up going with Braintree. I was really surprised but their documentation for integration in a Ruby on Rails app at that time was a lot more complete.
Edit: Get the charge volume point, but 15% of top sites versus less than 1% seems to indicate something. Also, websites added/dropped going negative for Braintree. That can’t be a good thing.
You’d want to measure based on charge volume, not sites using each service.
My understanding is Braintree is cheaper when you get big enough.
Edit: it doesn’t cost you anything to accept Stripe on your site. Would you figure Optimizely revenue from all of its free plan users they just purged? You would not.
