Yes, you got it right! We think it’s time to break up with PayPal and give the floor to Stripe, the hottest new payment processor!
But why?
It’s simple. There are three main reasons every vendor or user of PayPal is facing:
- Hidden high exchange rates.
- Cross border fees.
- Old technology.
Old Technology, Bad Developer Experience
I will honestly say that PayPal is probably the worst developer experience I’ve had in that same time period. And this was for a very simple implementation of a single product one-time purchase.
It took hours to figure out what product I wanted. PayPal’s product assortment is a trainwreck. What the hell is the difference between Web Payments and Web Payments Pro and Adaptive Payments and about a dozen other things with idiotic names that all sound the same. The chart that tries to help you pick a product is useless.
The layout of paypal’s website is labyrinthine. Even after I figured out what product I needed, assembling all the relevant documentation was hard.
The documentation is flat-out wrong in several (rather important) places. For example, the IPN guide (naturally, a PDF) on page 9 clearly states that you must explicitly post back messages to paypal to get them to stop sending (which is retarded and screws up transactions), but HN says that this is not the case. You can see my venting about this almost a year ago here.
Posting a technical question to PayPal’s forum gave me an unhelpful response from a clearly first-level “read the flowchart” technical support rep. Pointless exercise.
PayPal’s APIs all feel like they were designed in the 1990s. Seriously, I would be horribly embarrassed to publish an API like that. I put more thought into (and produce better documentation for) my opensource projects. Useless crap websites like Foursquare can come up with solid APIs, there’s no excuse for a company that handles actual money to be this janky.
stickfigure on Hacker News
You know, PayPal is that the pioneer of payment processing and that is why it is so widely used by every store.
The system came on the scene as how to send cash via email, and that’s still a cool method on its original purpose. People were at first drawn to PayPal as a result of you weren’t needed to make a businessperson account or pay monthly fees. You would solely be charged a fee once somebody sent you cash, and therefore the fees were pretty nominal.
Let’s Talk About Fees
Check out PayPal’s transaction fees:
- International fee of 3.9% + fixed fee.
- For refunds, PayPal retains the fixed fee.
- American Express fee of 3.5%.
Really unfair taxes and the wide launch of Stripe is changing that!
The Alternative?
They handle billions of dollars every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world. Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor, and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1. This is the most stringent level of certification available.
It even has a 7-day waiting period for initial transactions, during which time it profiles the businesses involved to protect against potential fraud.Stripe is accepting payments from everywhere and currently powers businesses in over 25 countries.
They are expanding very fast and just have launched for companies in six more European countries.
