Possibly. I'm still angry at Square because I emailed them repeatedly 10+ years ago telling them to add gateway processing (which they didn't have), and they took forever. Stripe's business shouldn't even exist. Square had a head start and should have just made a payment gateway/API and eaten their lunch. They absolutely had an internal API, quite obviously, so not productizing it and letting a whole new business in Stripe come around and launch that product and crush them was absurd.

I've used Square's on-premises processing for minor stuff like a side business of mine, but nothing too serious. Their fees aren't too good; they're comparable to Stripe but Stripe's ecosystem for developers is far better.

If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support.

That's pretty funny in hindsight.

> If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support.

Also what we're considering right about now

Even I can see the humor in it. You are right!

I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium?

Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over the last year the customer service has gone to complete shit in our experience and the rates are still uncompetitively high. Frustrating.

Anecdotally: I've been looking to get answers from Stripe, about fees-related questions that either make my proposed use viable or unviable, and I've received nothing but copied & pasted email replies, a week+ later (or not at all), which essentially ignore what I've asked. Incredibly frustrating.

When I mention the experience to friends, they joke that I have Stockholm Syndrome; to want to continue pursuing them, despite their complete disregard.

Yeah that's sad. I asked for a fee reduction 2 years into our relationship, and they said no because of XYZ but if we hit revenue targets ABC that they'd re-evaluate.

About a year later, we hit revenue targets ABC, I waited a month (just for systems to catch up) and emailed them. We had a good discussion about a rate cut and they knocked their fees down as they promised.

I emailed in 3-4 years after that and asked for a rate cut as our revenues had gone up by about 10x, and they said they could not, but provided explanations on why because of high international processing, high AMEX/Discover processing, etc. Totally cool, I understood that and appreciated the detailed email. Wasn't disappointed at all.

I tried back a year or so later when our revenues shot up but got the same message more or less, but still personalized. Again, I had to try, but also, not unhappy.

And since all of those excellent customer service responses - many of which did not go my way, which is not how I rate interactions - it's been awful. The corporate card team refuses to answer questions or even apologize for their insane limit cuts. They presumably are hiding behind bullshit KYC/AML justifications for their actions or protecting their algorithmic decisions in order to provide us zero actionable customer support with no personalization. It's embarrassing.

Who are you looking at switching to? I'm also starting to evaluate alternatives to Stripe.

I don't want to drop any names here because we're in the exploratory phase, haven't even started negotiations with anyone yet. But there are alternatives that are quite a bit cheaper that offer fewer frills.

Humorously enough we needed a sales tax solution, and Stripe Tax is vastly outgunned by its competitors, possibly leading to the layoffs in its department. It is a significantly inferior product to Avalara, which is the leading product in the space.

you should definitely check out the merchant of record model. Funnily enough, I work in the payments space and this is a use case we see all the time - as businesses start scale and hit tax thresholds, they start implementing even more tools to handle this on top of their existing payment stack.

Instead, perhaps consider a billing platform that handles payments, subscriptions and sales tax all in one. With the merchant of record model, you remove the need to worry about sales tax altogether, the payment provider does so on your behalf (including liability if there is a miscalculation). Shoot me an email if you want any more info nick.read @paddle.com, happy to provide more info

There are a lot of alternatives: Checkout.com, Adyen, are the most tech forward I’ve found.

Yeah that's tech for you! E4X was a ES standard, but Mozilla dropped it in 2014, then FB pick it and made JSX and now that is the defacto "Front-End" development.

You're better off with Adyen.

OT: I just went through Adyen's prohibited businesses. Why does every major payment processor prohibit vendors of adult toys from using their payment services?

I mean, those aren't even high risk businesses. Credit card fraud usually happens when you offer high priced electronics. Chargebacks usually happen when you sell digital goods like templates, ebooks, videos etc.

You need a merchant account from a high-risk processor, combined with a generic gateway like Authorize.Net. (Don't use their built in processor) The all in one solutions like Stripe or Adyen are convenient but they aren't what high-risk industries need.

Yes, but how are adult toy sellers "high risk"?

High chargeback rate when one partner won't fess up to spending $300 at Bob's House'O'Dildos?

Because shipping 6 dildos to Texas can put you in jail.

https://www.ladbible.com/news/latest-the-texan-laws-around-s...

The US federal overturn of the Texas law was based around Roe v Wade which has itself been overturned so the Texas law is now back in action.

From the article: “According to Section 43.23 of the Texas penal code, although it doesn’t clearly state dildos, the law still regulates the possession of ‘obscene devices’”

liberal propaganda derived from an SNL skit.

The Forbidden Fruit raid from 1989 was real. I recommend doing some research so that you are not so embarassingly ignorant.

Here a starting point: https://www.austinchronicle.com/features/2000-08-11/78186/

Huh?

Do you have a recommendation for a middle layer for making pretty checkout flows via the API? Authorize.net is what we use - but their API is tough.

I'd love to see a Stripe style wrapper around Authorize, but I don't think it exists. Just thankful we can use JSON now instead of their XML API.

I've wondered about this, too. The simple and unhelpful answer is because banks/CC companies are conservative and consider them high risk. So why is that? I've been able to find two factors: 1) associated (correctly or not) with the sex industry, which is taboo, possibly regulated or outright illegal. 2) high rate of chargebacks. Factors leading to high chargebacks could include no returns allowed and taboo/shame. Imagine an insecure partner finds a charge on a CC and the other partner claims they didn't purchase it, leading to a chargeback to support the lie.

Here is one of the better articles I found: https://instabill.com/do-adult-toys-fall-into-the-high-risk-...

The credit card networks have brand protection clauses in their operating procedures.

They likely don’t actually prohibit adult toys specifically but payment processors can be conservative in fear of having major disruptions from the networks.

Stripe's rules don't even make sense on this - OnlyFans uses Stripe somehow

Their offering perfectly fit the bill for what we needed, but they turned us away; citing a requirement of transacting €5M per year, despite us needing a payment handler /for launch/.

That’s sad. We integrated Adyen like 5-6 years ago and this requirement was nowhere to be found. All I remember was their SDKs are difficult to integrate.

That's the main one we're investigating. You have good things to say?

No, neither for merchants nor for developers.

Better in what way? I personally would never use a Square product (I feel the entire org has major ethical issues) however other players in this space include Braintree, Amazon Payments and a host of 3rd parties - although 3rd parties are discontinuing internet based direct gateway access such as CardConnect.

I'm curious what ethical issues you have with Square, but are fine with Amazon Payments.

Square has more ethical issues than Amazon?

PayPal owns BrainTree now