After leaving the US, I realized how terribly behind our banking system is compared to every other country in the world. Most of the EU, Australia, NZ all have direct person-to-person transfer via account number. Any bank to any bank, via web or phone app. Germany and other EU nations go further and offer TAN numbers (1-time use numbers, sorta-2-factor, but not really).
The US ACH system is absolutely terrible. The Federal Reserve need a supplemental system with 1-directional person-to-person transfer numbers. Our tax numbers also need to stop being used as a secret. No other country does that.
The US doesn't have that? I can't transfer money to you, even if I have your bank account number? How are people expected to transfer money to each other then?
Yes, it's ridiculous
In India we have IMPS (sort of an instant transfer) which takes less than a second and costs Rs. 5 at a private bank (free at a public sector one).
I've been to Australia and transferring money to another account with the same bank requires just a mobile number.
I'm sorry–I love Stripe as a product–but it blows my mind that a company with a $5B+ valuation that touches your business' money only has email support. Not even fast email support (in my experience, 12h+ response time is normal). Not even a ticket number.
They offer $50k in processing fee-free, which saves you ~ $1500 immediately.
Their fee for currency conversion is 1%, while Stripe's is 2%.
They reply much faster to email inquires and you can call them.
They support more countries than Stripe.ACH is cheaper than cards, but it's also slower and has a limit of $10,000 per transaction [1]. Cards have a limit of $1 million per transaction [2], which is 100x bigger than ACH. Also, people are used to paying with cards.
[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/accepting-ach-payments-with-stripe
[2] https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-maximum-amount-i-can-charge-with-stripeAnd $10k limit for ACH? You can transfer more money than that via SWIFT.
Of course not. Maybe your bank has such a limit on your card, but there's definitely no hard limit that low imposed by any of the Visa/Mastercard/Amex. How else would you buy things over $2k?
Not surprising. It seems ACH is still run with punch card technology
... limit of $2k USD per day.
If you have items with high prices, just send users a quick notification to check whether their cards have a limit and to ask their bank to lift it.
My wife's box club business gets dinged all the time by fraudulent transactions. She uses CrateJoy, and they tell us it's our and Stripe's job to filter fraud. Well, I don't have a 24/7 SOC dedicated to filtering out fraud, so I have to rely on Stripe. Stripe, even with all the verification features enabled, still does very little to prevent fraudulent charges. My wife loses a not insignificant portion of her money on heavy renewal months (like 3 months after Christmas and most recently 6 months after Christmas) with people charging back for fraud or just because they want a refund. And of course Stripe is happy to slurp up the insane fees for it.
We'd move, but CrateJoy makes things really, really, really easy for her in terms of managing members and shipping. It's just a bummer to deal with this all the time.
In fact, Stripe loves the chargeback fees, and there's a whole lot of "stuff" that's waiting to be released (and I don't mean as a feature) that will kindly support this.
"Hi joshmn I'd love to hear how we can improve [but we will actually take what you say with a grain of salt because you're not in our club.]"
I might sound bitter, but I'm not; I'm simply appalled. Not because I was burned by Stripe personally. Instead, my clients have, and you probably know someone that has too.
Please for the love of your company/business/project, review transactions carefully. For most things that are just getting started, all it takes is one transaction to really screw things up. For businesses, you have ~3 lives.
Your now-friendly, former-fraudster