Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: can somebody enlighten me about Stripe's appeal? I am not an user (until recently they weren't even available in my country) but I used ShareIt (now Digital River) 20 years ago and Avangate (now 2checkout soon Verifone) in the past 15 years and they both:

- had a much larger international presence, with localizations and everything

- had sales taxes, VATs etc computed from day one

- had cart (not sure about ShareIt though) & API

- integrated countless payment gateways: from credit cards to purchase orders, wire transfers and even PayPal

How comes Stripe won even if they arrived much later on the market? I believe their pricing structure was not very far from the competition. What did they offer to attract users even though they lacked such important features?

I want to learn.

View on HN

The developer experience and ease and speed of integration are second to none. They managed to take a commodity service performed by many incumbents and make it so effortless that it blows away the competition.

Yes, I heard that (couldn't test it myself). The integration for Avangate for example was a proof-of-concept PHP file and a couple of docs explaining the CGI parameters. Not great but not that horrible either.

But were those so incredible that it made up for the missing features? I mean if it was me I wouldn't implement the sales tax myself in a million years, no matter how nice the experience and integration was...

Stripe came up in an era when nobody in the US worried about taxes, generally speaking. That's changing now.

Any good references on this? Curious

Specifically on the SaaS front, taxability has been murky and there's not a single standard across the US: https://blog.taxjar.com/saas-sales-tax/

A couple of years ago, internet sales tax across state lines started being enforced. I think there was also a temporary moratorium to build up ecommerce while in its early stages. This case was related:

https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2018/sep/supreme-court-...

It's pretty weird hearing anyone talk about CGI parameters these days, so perhaps that should also tell you something?

That was 15-20 years ago, integration today has evolved, of course...

Disclaimer: I now work at Stripe but the following was purely when I used them as a user:

Stripe targeted developers from day one and made it extremely simple to get up and running (literally seven lines of code for a working payments system) and they documented their api very well.

Then they added on a lot of stuff that made me (as a user) happy, like paying out to my bank account a lot more quickly than the competition, adding recurring subscriptions with a few more lines of code etc.

Basically, their systems just worked out of the box and were more polished than others that I used.

If I want to know how much Stripe will cost, I can visit Stripe's webpage and see all the fees laid out. It doesn't tell me "Talk to sales", which is common in the payment/tax calculation business.

Stripe's documentation and API integration was so simple compared to Paypal and others.

I believe that. But on the other hand you had to implement sales tax - that seems to me a few orders of magnitude more complicated. Was it worth the tradeoff maybe?

Sales tax is not a "I need this at launch" feature. Many companies start out in a single market where you can just hardcode the tax rates if you want, and worry about that later (and then the engineering hours to add sales tax etc. are probably not a threat to your existence).

Gotcha. My products were addressing the global market from day 1 so the ability to automatically send an invoice with a correctly calculated sales tax to buyers from any country on the planet seemed vital. Let's also not forget about collecting and remitting said tax to correct tax authorities...

There were companies that filled that gap, like Taxjar (now acquired by Stripe)

Banking in the US is at least a decade behind the rest of the developed world. Bank to bank transfers, credit cards, etc. etc. are all like banking in Australia in the late 90s.

So for those in the US, Stripe is amazing. For those of us outside the US, it's just like all the other options we've had for 10+ years (as you said)

Besides for the extreme ease of documentation (which is getting a little harder now that there's so many different services), Stripe gained a lot of traction at the start.

Stripe was one of the first credit card acceptance companies with $0 monthly fees. I was paying a merchant account monthly, then authorize.net gateway fee, then an extra $20 to authorize.net to store tokens. Then the per-card fees were somewhat opaque with every card (qualified vs non-qualified) having different pricing.

With stripe, it became much lower risk: pay a set fee for each transaction. No monthly minimums.

Many of the credit card companies have moved to this model, but it was rather cutting edge and seemed much more "fair" for a commoditized gateway.

I have to say that when I first evaluated Stripe I was comparing it to things like authorize.net. I haven't meaningfully looked at the other available options since. Stripe is easy and known and I haven't gotten org pushback about it. So maybe just ignorance?

Thanks for sharing these options.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com