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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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