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Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

Python and Flask are great, but the secret ingredient here seems to be Stripe. His goal was payment processing, and Stripe made everything else nearly trivial.

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Agreed. This is freakin' magic:

    try:
        charge = stripe.Charge.create(
                amount=int(product.price * 100),
                currency='usd',
                card=stripe_token,
                description=email)
    except stripe.CardError, e:
        return """..err.."""
    print charge

I could not agree more. Stripe = insanely awesome payment processor. With all the heavy lifting they do,

I'm now unsure what something like Gumroad's value proposition is, considering I'm basically at feature parity with them (aside from PDF stamping, which I don't do anyway).

There are more people who don't know how to code than do.

Great article. Last summer I put together a concept app for a micro-coding marketplace using Python and Flask. Stripe made taking payments insanely simple.

Ditto. Stripe rocks! Simple to integrate and get it up and running in few mins.

Global availability.

After a few years, Stripe is still only available in a handful of countries. If you live in a country that is not only not US (tier 1 for pretty much everything), but not even the handful of high-priority countries like Canada or UK, your options are greatly reduced. For me, for example, it's PayPal or FastSpring - I would love to use Stripe, but I simply can't.

Which part of this is 'magic'? Serious question. That seems like standard python api client + standard payment processor api.

For those of us who've used Authorize.net in the past, a simple API client is essentially magic.

I agree. Maybe I'm getting to be one of those old unix dudes or something, but I was doing something that was essentially exactly the same in 2000 using Lotusscript on Domino 4.6.

You gather params, post it somewhere, check out the response, and display it. It gets fancier with age, but it's essentially the same thing.

Take a look at the paypal api.

Also the stripe_token is pretty magic, it lets you make charges to customer credit cards without storing the card details or having to take them to an external payment page.

Have you actually ever integrated with a payment processor before? I have. I agree that this is magical.

I use Stripe on my site https://gauthify.com (first I used a while back, sticky to change)

I use Braintree at my current job.

I used to work for Balanced.

I know payment processors. Its just times have changed and this kind of thing is now quite standard. But 'magical' is of opinion, I was just inquiring what he found magical.

late to the party, but "magic" is the explanation for a dramatic difference between the expected difficulty and the actual difficulty. For example reading my mind to determine my choice of card should involve neurosurgery, EEG and MRI scans and training corpuses - however a 15 year old with a deck of cards can do it - which clearly is magic.

That's the part I didn't get: he says he wrote this to replace three different processors. If Stripe is a payment processor, what exactly did he replace?

Sorry, the terminology is confusing. What I replaced are the digital goods checkout services (that use processors like Stripe in the backend). They help you manage and sell digital goods, by, for example, generating a unique token for each purchase so that every customer has a different download URL. Clearly, as seen here, they don't add much value.

Gumroad charges 5% + 25¢ per transaction.

Compared with Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢, it's expensive, but Gumroad appears to do two things that Stripe doesn't:

- Work out whether and how much sales tax to charge (which I guess should be easy if you operate in only one state)

- Absorb chargeback fees

This second one makes the 5% seem more reasonable.

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