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Comment by fabricexpert | Hacker News Reader

I see similar results on an ecommerce site. PayPal's UX (login, click buy) is a better experience over entering a 16 digit credit card, expiry date, csv & address. It's one or two clicks and payment is done.

It's unfortunate but people will always choose the easiest way irrespective of the costs to the merchant. It would be interesting to see what happens if you charge 2% more for PayPal (or whatever the difference in fees are / amount you need to cover the costs/risk of working with PayPal). I suspect checkout conversions would drop.

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PayPal's UX (login, click buy) is a better experience over entering a 16 digit credit card, expiry date, csv & address.

You're comparing the UX for a customer who already has a credit card registered to a Paypal account with the UX of a user who doesn't have a credit card registered with Stripe. If your customer has a Paypal account with a registered card the UX is better. If they don't then Stripe is much nicer because you'd need to include the Paypal sign up process in your UX and that's horrible.

Plus Stripe offers the same benefit of remembering the customer's card details for subsequent purchases (https://stripe.com/docs/saving-cards).

Does the customer know that they are storing their card details with Stripe and not with the merchant?

I think that's important because some people (such as myself) tend to avoid storing card details with arbitrary merchants. I would be far more comfortable knowing that my card details are stored with a specialised payments company like Stripe.

If you already have a credit card with Stripe then definitely yes, you know the merchant doesn't have your card number. IIRC, when you first enter a credit card you remain on a web page controlled by the merchant, so it would be hard for Stripe to guarantee the merchant didn't intercept it in any way. Since this guarantee isn't possible, they're not going to show a message that says the credit card is stored at Stripe and not the merchant. It's up to the merchant to show such a message.

You can implement Stripe such that the merchant never sees the credit card number.

Yes, you can. To ever see the credit card number you'd have to be trying. But I don't see a way to implement stripe in such a way that the credit card entry happens on a separate page on stripe's site where the customer can look at the padlock in their browser's location bar to know that only stripe has access to the entered information.

This can be done with the new version of Stripe Checkout - it’s essentially a hosted payment page.

Paypal will happily process credit card charges without needing the customer to have a Paypal account. They call it DirectPay

Of course, and in that case as the user has to enter their credit card details DirectPay's UX is more comparable to Stripe. In my opinion Stripe is preferable in that situation as it's just looks much better, and has friendlier language around it.

In some countries PayPal requires users to create an account.

Hands down it's that UX for me that causes me to use PayPal whenever it is available, but if it's not available I don't mind having to input my card 9 times out of ten.

I use paypal where available over direct credit card entry not because of the UX, which isn't perfect IMO and in the past has been worse, or because I particularly like paypal otherwise, but because it limits the amount of places I'm handing my credit card details to. I work under the hope that this reduces the attack surface area for those details being attained by the many ne'er-do-wells out there.

Same. That comes from experience. 2 out of 2 of the places I've worked professionally that took CC payments directly initially had CC numbers appearing in plaintext application logs.

It's harder to make that kind of mistake in a Paypal integration so if I'm buying from someone outside of my comfort zone I'll look to use Paypal.

Stripe also makes that kind of thing more difficult to do accidentally. I've occasionally had a look to see if a company used stripe.js before putting in my details.

The harder UX should go away "soon", when the Payment Request API[0] lands. Then you can just directly select a credit card that's already stored in your browser, which should place it on par with Paypal.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...

I have seen higher costs for PayPal (well, and credit cards) quite often for German and EU online stores.

AFAIK paypals terms&service forbid to demand a higher price for paying with paypal.

Also theres a german law which forbids additional fees for paying with CC.

The credit card thing is only since 2018, forgot about that. Regarding PayPal, maybe it is in their TOS, but here [0] is a Screenshot from Airberlin (from an article about the new CC rules [1]) from before 2018. 7€ extra for both PayPal and CC, 5€ for SEPA and no extra cost for GiroPay.

[0]: https://reisetopia.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Zahlungsm%C...

[1]: https://reisetopia.de/news/abschaffung-kreditkartengebuehren...

>Also theres a german law which forbids additional fees for paying with CC.

Interesting, because lots of brick-and-mortar German businesses (especially restaurants) simply don't take credit cards, because of the processor fees. You'll go very hungry in Germany if you go there with a credit card and no way of getting any cash.

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