Every ecommerce company and retailer looks at payment fees as money left on the table.
The more money Stripe take on, the more they need to return to investors, and so the more pressure to make margin. That is the opportunity for the future.
I too doubt it would come from a bank, nor from Visa and Mastercard... but could another exist? Yes!
If it came from a big player, I'd be looking at Shopify.
My employer never bothers switching to any competitor because Stripe match any deal that their competitors present to us.
Could you, a single person and $500m of seed funding match Stripe's prices? Not without hemorrhaging cash.
One of Amazon's moats is low pricing as well, which can only be achieved with eye-watering scale (their margins are 0% in some categories, they make it up by delaying payments to vendors and pocketing the interest).
Not only was the offer from Braintree way better, they gave us a better deal on PayPal fees as well.
Stripe’s focus on their supplementary offerings, like Billing (which used to be effectively free) and Checkout show that they’re trying to eat more of the transaction percentage. Try mentioning PayPal button on a Stripe Checkout page and you will be muted from talking in their YouTube broadcast.
Overall, I’m bearish on Stripe and look forward to shorting them on the public market, whenever that day comes.
It'll probably go down very well with potential investors.
What negotiation are you referring to? Interchange pricing is fixed; they are not negotiating discounts on that.
If you mean Stripe has VC funding to be a loss leader then, correct, but that’s not a moat. Moats are what protect profitable businesses. The resultant scale could be a moat but Stripe is still a small slice of the payment processing market.
Their play here is to upsell premium services. Developer friendliness and moderate pricing (it’s actually not that low) are hooks to get in the door of startups.
Why is that? Is it something Stripe achieved over time?