I too have heard nothing but good things about Stripe. I've recently started a partnership with a good friend of mine in Sweden to build some apps together. I wanted to use Stripe but soon found out that it would not work outside of the US =(
Definitely, I constantly see people (myself included) want Stripe here.
I would appreciate more updates though from Stripe about the progress of entering the Australian market.
For all I know, they haven't even started talking to anyone yet, but knowing some progress information would be appreciated, instead of them saying they won't talk about it.
Pin is attempting to do this in the Australian market http://pin.net.au/ -- but they are early days and it's a closed beta... Even so, I wish them good luck & rapid progress.
I read the link and thought exactly the same thing. I'm patiently waiting. Although my father does have a green card, maybe I can get a bank account under his name. :)
There seem to be ways to open a bank account as a non-US resident. Services related to this might be an opportunity, like middleman shipping services. I've been told you can open a Bank of America account online/over the phone without a SSN if you can use someone's US address.
I read, but haven't verified, that one can open an ING US account if you have an ING account in your country.
I had no difficulty at all opening an account with Harris Bank. It's possible that it helped that I'm Canadian and they're owned by a Canadian bank, though.
I like that the by product of stripe creating a service, that smart startups want, is a great curated list of interesting web apps for me to check out.
Glad to have my company on there (http://codiqa.com/). Stripe has been great so far, I can't believe I ever used PayPal before.
My one desire for Stripe is more recurring subscription features, like notifying users of expired cards, sending invoices, receipts, etc. Initially I did that by hand but we've since paired it with Spreedly (http://spreedly.com/) which does all of that and it's a nice combo.
Ah good point, thanks. I still think there's room to reduce the amount of work required to polish Stripe billing/payment data and make a nice user experience.
After Apple gave us the run around and rejected us using In-App Payment for our premium insurance services, we tried switching to PayPal.
After countless headaches with PayPal, we switched to Stripe in 1 working day. Huge fan of their service, great API design and documentation. Keep it up, gents!
Yes, that's our standalone app. We also offer developers a SDK so an app can have the full functionality in a small SOS button with 3 lines of code. Developers don't pay for data storage, sms, or ivr fees. For customers, it's free to use with friends and family as your "response team".
Our premium services are global-reaching, they go so far as to coordinate with private search and rescue teams if you were traveling abroad and something serious happened.
One area of research is around passive alerts such as "impact detection". We are working with fitness apps for detecting if a bike rider may have crashed. This is a very exciting project.
Thanks for the feedback, I will work on the messaging. We are definitely trying to avoid the ambulance-chaser feel of other sites like LifeAlert.
It's a shame they haven't launched in the UK yet. I've been trying to keep up to date with how things are progressing but they only ever say that they are looking to expand, with no indication of a time frame etc. I might look into developing a little competition for them at this rate.
All the praise I've heard about Stripe has been from a developer's perspective. But, as a user, I find logging in to PayPal(/Google Wallet/Amazon Payments) and clicking a couple buttons much more convenient than having to enter (+ look up) all my information every time. I find it great that Stripe makes the developers' lives easier, but should we be excited about making things harder for customers in the process?
Perhaps Stripe would consider a login service. Create a Stripe account and rather than it be a full blown Payment service ala Paypal, it would simply store your CC details.
Stripe can already store CC details. You can create users for each of your customers through the API and then build out your own "easy payments" system without having your users ever leave your site.
It's more than just payments within any given app though. The issue (/proposed issue) is that every time you join a new site or pay for a product on a new site you need to look up your details again. This isn't the case for sites using paypal, assuming the user has a paypal account which it seems most people do.
The expectation is that it would not be mandatory (incidentally: it is not for PayPal Express Checkout either: you can pay with a credit card without having to log in to an account).
Well, yes, as long as that credit card is not somehow linked to an account: if it is linked Paypal will simply refuse to let you use it without logging in.
The OP said "have to create an account", not "log in to an account": it is generally much simpler to log in to an existing PayPal account than type in your credit card number, and billing address.
That's probably the takeaway here. Stripe is probably the first contender PayPal actually has to worry about, at least in the United States. People hate PayPal because their TOS are restrictive, but so far they're the only payment handler that works everywhere. If Stripe goes global, then we will see some serious changes at PayPal as people begin to flee from their services en masse.
Globalization is something they claim to have been working on for a very long time now. Paypal has done it, so it is possible. I wonder what the roadblocks are for Stripe that Paypal doesn't have to deal with.
The comment I was replying to said "People hate PayPal because their TOS are restrictive." I just tend to feel that PayPal hate is rather overstated here... people just have PayPal indifference for the most part.
What are the chances of Stripe offering micropayments like Paypal? For charges of $1 or less. There are so many areas waiting for this, and Paypal just isn't friendly enough of a platform to try this direction.
According to their pricing at 2.9% + 30c per charge that leaves you with 18.55c. Paypal is 5% + $0.05, a massive 47.45c. If Stripe could even partially match that I'd be delighted. I'm currently looking into Amazon's aggregated option and haven't come up with numbers yet.
You are allowed to have two accounts (this is even officially recommended by PayPal), one with micropayments and the other with normal payments; as you know the amount of money being requested before transferring the user to PayPal, you can use the two accounts to get the best possible rate in all cases.
For those using Stripe to ship physical goods, can you please comment on how you're handling the fact that Stripe does not validate the billing address prior to the charge going through?
I'd love to implement Stripe on my website but very worried that this could lead to fraudulent charges.
Is there any documentation for this process? Our non-profit had to shut down our Stripe-based donation page because it was being used by credit card thieves to validate stolen credit cards. Stripe told us addresses are only validated when a charge is executed, meaning we would then have to issue a refund if address validation failed (and eat the transaction cost).
We honestly could not have launched so soon without Stripe. We spent over a month haggling with Authorize.net and immediately jumped ship to Stripe as soon as it was available.
It makes accepting payments (and subscriptions!) so easy.
Couldn't agree more, the subscriptions API is so well designed...and surprisingly complete. Every time I think of something I need to add, the API already has a simple, logical method for dealing with it. Top-notch work.
Awesome design work here! Love that they featured some awesome companies including mine Startup Threads (http://StartupThreads.com). The fact that the order isn't fixed is also a nice touch.
They have a project of mine on there (eMusicTheory.com), and I admittedly didn't ask to be removed, but the paranoid side of me worried... if there's a particular security flaw in Stripe (or websites' common implementations of Stripe for payments) that turns up in the future, I'm on the cracking shortlist.
You mean, thousands of sites across the United States.
The day one of these great payment processing services begins offering worldwide coverage will be the day that we finally get rid of PayPal.