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Comment by smarx | Hacker News Reader

Hi all! I'm one of Webscript's founders.

It's nice to see Webscript back on HN. You may enjoy reading the discussion from a couple years back when we first launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4718686.

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Hi! Nice product, I'd like to upgrade. But I don't want to use Stripe. Any plans to use something else - btc/paypal - as a payment method in the future?

I really like the idea - put the LuaVM to great use handling this and make things really simple with a hosted namespace. I'll be using my free account in the next few days ..

I'm glad you like it, but we have no plans to take payments in any other form.

Is there a reason you don't want to use Stripe?

I'm in Europe, where Stripe support is quite spotty, and also I don't want to expose my credit card/customer credit cards to yet another 3rd party. Paypal is the #1 payment method chosen by my customers, so that is important to me.

For you Americans - Stripe may seem 'global' but in fact its far from it. At the moment only 5 western nations are officially supported, with 12 more in beta - well thats not going to be very good for those of us with a bigger market share than the 17 countries where Stripe is currently able to operate. Its a start - but its too much of a limit.

>At the moment only 5 western nations are officially supported, with 12 more in beta

Isn't the "support" just for entities accepting payments with Stripe, rather than the customers who are actually paying? I ask this because I accept payments with Stripe, and have seen cards processed successfully from many countries, even non-Western countries that Stripe doesn't offer merchant support in.

I understand that shopping online in Europe is a bit more complex with the EMV/Visa Electron system that is popular in the region, so I get where PayPal would fit in here since it can be linked to a checking account. Just wondering what specifically you mean by Stripe not "supporting" certain regions.

The problem is the 'accepting payments' that you refer to is 'paying by credit card' - where this is usually universally possible - but if you don't have a credit card and want instead to pay with cash by linking your bank account, Stripe doesn't have the mechanism in place to do that yet, in all banking markets in Europe.

Since America is run by its credit cards, I can understand why this is difficult to understand, but a majority of folks in Europe simply don't use credit cards, preferring always to pay cold hard cash. It's just different. And existing payment infrastructures - such as paypal and so on - already solved this problem as well as they can, decades ago, so to be honest its sort of lame to have to be explaining this already about Stripe. Stripe currently has a lot of hype, and as a service it is good for us merchants where our markets are limited to those regions also bound by Stripes' investment into its infrastructure, but outside of that: Stripe is quite a bit mediocre in this market.

> a majority of folks in Europe simply don't use credit cards

Ehm? Europe's a very big place, and in many European countries credit cards are just as common and as commonly used as in the US.

Europe is a big place, which is why its disappointing that Stripe doesn't cover a majority of the EU region .. yet .. but you are mistaken in thinking that credit card use is as common as it in the US - in fact, its not the case. Direct-deposit is far more common, even still today - Europeans' don't have such a dependency on personal credit as the American market demonstrates, alas ..

Thanks for explaining!

I'm curious; would you share your preference for not using Stripe?

Not supported all over Europe, so its a pretty nasty dissection of my market. Not everyone uses credit cards these days, and fewer and fewer folks are as willing to just hand over such details as they used to .. Paypal has better European-market support and just plain works for a lot of my customers, which is why I asked.

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