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Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

Thanks for explaining!

> 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 ..

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