Re:Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet
by watchdogtimer on Thursday March 08, 2018 @02:22PM
(#16546866)
That's one reason we chose Braintree over Stripe. They both take about the same amount of work to implement, but Braintree gives you the ability to accept PayPal in addition to credit cards with almost no extra effort.
Re:Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet
by jenthoven on Thursday March 08, 2018 @07:47PM
(#16549016)
[This is Julia, the OC]: We started integrating with Paypal and basically gave up because of the engineering effort required. Vs Stripe, which has a great web and iOS app and has been seamless from day 1.
Re:Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet
by stickfigure on Friday March 09, 2018 @01:18AM
(#16550091)
Congratulations on dodging a bullet!
Paypal is one of the hidden mines that await startups - you could have had your smartest engineers working on it for months, possibly sinking the whole endeavor as other (actually important) things fail to get done. Unless you have engineering assets to burn, Paypal is absolutely toxic.
Re:Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet
by gomox on Friday March 09, 2018 @01:44AM
(#16550167)
The actual bullet dodged is PayPal's tendency to freeze your account and the funds within for six months without warning, explanation or appeal. That'll kill a startup real quick.
Re:Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet
by dennisgorelik on Friday March 09, 2018 @02:51AM
(#16550359)
We never had problems with PayPal freezing account, but I agree with stickfigure that PayPal API is bad (high maintenance).
Paypal's documentation is horrid; they have several competing APIs (the most obvious choice - the REST API - has been silently abandoned); there are many active bugs; their support is slow and unreliable; the admin UX is horrid (finding transactions can be very hard); you will find yourself discovering the hard way how the system behaves on error; and oh there will be lots of errors.
Stripe is stupid simple by comparison, and impeccably reliable.
I pushed thousands of transactions per day through each. Paypal practically required a dedicated engineer to follow up on all the chaos. They periodically lost transactions (and fessed up to it after hours of debugging and support). They lost support tickets too. It's maddening.
If you aren't in a high volume business, Paypal is NOT worth the development headache. You can probably get 20% more users by spending the time building features your users care about.