I've said this before, but each payment provider out there has benefits the others don't, which is a little annoying. For example, Balanced is inferior in almost all regards to Stripe except in one major area: Payment speed. Stripe offers 7-day rolling payouts (shorter for larger merchants), but Balanced offers next day payments and same day for Wells Fargo customers!

Square offers same-day payouts and the best in-person dongle experience. But - and I have NO idea why this is - they offer no web API. Ridiculous.

Stripe has the best third-party plugin support and best documentation.

For now, I use Stripe, and they've worked with me to speed up payments. But you can't beat same-day payments that Balanced offers (I do use WF) and if Balanced ever starts funding and encouraging developers to work on plugins for major shopping carts, I will switch immediately.

How is Balanced inferior, exactly? I would call neither party inferior, but as far as I can see Balanced has the better product. Two things Balanced has that Stripe does not: ACH debit and credit, and programmatic merchant underwriting. Massive features IMO.

The big win Balanced has over Stripe is the ability to use their payouts API independently of whether you're using them to collect credit card and ACH debits or not. So you could be charging cards through Stripe and paying out via Balanced. Stripe forces you to charge cards through them in order to do any payouts.

It's true Stripe is integrated with more shopping carts and invoicing systems, but Balanced will get there. Personally, it would be great to see a Balanced credit card and ACH FreshBooks/Harvest integration because we're moving more into invoicing, as we're now dealing with larger companies and larger payments.

Oh, I didn't notice that stripe doesn't do the merchant underwriting. That's a non starter for us.

To clarify: Stripe underwrites you as the merchant. Balanced lets the API user underwrite anyone (yourself or someone else) as a merchant, allowing for example the operation of a marketplace, where each merchant has their own merchant account. Balanced allows you to underwrite an arbitrary number of merchants programmatically via API. Correct me if I am wrong, and I am sure pc will do if this is the case, but Stripe does not offer this functionality.

(I work at Stripe.) When you create a seller via the API, both Stripe and Balanced do the exact same thing: verify the identity of seller. You can run a marketplace on either.

Edit: I'm using the words seller and recipient interchangeably: https://stripe.com/docs/api#update_recipient

I'm sorry, I can't see any mention of a seller resource at https://stripe.com/docs/api, nor does the Ruby library seem to implement it. Is it called something other than Seller?

I am very curious about this as well.

Hm? We absolutely do perform the underwriting ourselves.

OH! Very interesting!

Want to drop me a note? [email protected].

Third party plugins is not even close. Shopping carts overwhelmingly support Stripe and not Balanced.

EDIT: Not sure who downvoted you; it was a fair question. I countered it with an upvote.

Thanks. Shopping cart integration is first mover advantage. Stripe was the first to market with a product that dissolved two huge problems with accepting payments online: merchant underwriting and PCI-DSS compliance. Because of this it's unsurprising that i.) shopping carts rushed to integrate with them, and ii.) there is as much community good will toward Stripe as there is.

You could reach out to Balanced about API wrappers libs, I'm sure they would love someone to write language idiomatic libraries for them. It might be a nice contract gig.

>You could reach out to Balanced about API wrappers libs, I'm sure they would love someone to write language idiomatic libraries for them. It might be a nice contract gig.

I have, they suggested I open a ticket, and I did many months ago. No movement since.

I am not good enough to write a wrapper and frankly time/money preference dictates I spend it elsewhere, in any case.

I'd probably send them another note. They've been pretty good working with GitTip.

I've implemented Stripe, Stripe Connect and Balanced, and I consider them to be comparable in offerings if you are a traditional non-marketplace merchant. To say Balanced is inferior save for their Payout speed is not true. Their differences become more clear when you are operating as a marketplace.

It’s been stated before, and I’ll reiterate, Balanced’s merchant account underwriting for marketplaces is performed via their API. This means the marketplace retains complete visibility into the account signup process. With Stripe Connect, you are redirected to their website, which means your potential user may or may not ever make it back to your system for whatever reason.

During merchant underwriting, Stripe Connect requires each merchant to create an account on their system with their own username and password. This means they are free to access their account on Stripe outside of your system. While good for the merchant, it might not be so for the marketplace trying to ensure all transactions continue to run smoothly.

Also, because each merchant account in Stripe Connect is separate, the marketplace does not gain any economies of scale when it comes to pooling together all credit card transactions for volume pricing purposes. Balanced has a single escrow account that all funds are held in and does offer volume pricing based upon that.

In my opinion, Stripe’s focus originally seemed to be on the individual merchant and have recently made changes to make them more attractive to marketplaces. However, Balanced’s approach has been to offer a more complete solution for a marketplace, while still allowing for all the same features to be used as a single merchant.

> For example, Balanced is inferior in almost all regards to Stripe except in one major area: Payment speed.

We'll fix this.

This is something we experienced on The Wedding Favor. It was a trade-off we were aware of. On the other hand, it did trouble me that we were able to transfer money same-day to Chase bankholders with Balanced. It sounds great, but somewhere along the line that means that Balanced was "floating" our credit card charge and fronting the money to pay out to the end-recipient. While I appreciate this, and we benefit from very low chargeback rates (our users are friends and family), this seemed like a "too good to be true" risk.

In Stripe's case, you can make the business choice in your logic to pay out quicker to your end user, so long as you understand the risks (which you assume) and keep a comfortable account balance to cover it. Payouts to you, the Stripe account holder, is another matter!

That's great as this is one of the main reason we are using Balanced today for our soon to-be-launched marketplace.

We use it for the reddit marketplace and have loved it (balanced).

pc, nothing would make me happier. I cannot stress strongly enough how good your service is. That is literally the only thing I care about with regards to sustainment/upgrading of your service. (Not to say I haven't enjoyed the other things you've done, of course.)

We use balanced for reddit and I'm wondering if stripe works similarly such that from one incoming payment you can pay multiple bank accounts?

Yup. See https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe for more details.

Thanks. Not sure I see any reason to switch but its interesting.

pc, any word on if you'll be supporting ACH debits through stripe api anytime soon? (aka charging customers via bank accounts).

brackishlake, your comment is dead and you are probably hellbanned (no one can see your posts outside of a few who turn them on).

You have some really good comments here, so maybe re-register and post them again. You were likely banned for submitting/spamming your chriswinn.com posts.

I agree that Stripe has built a great product, and they have a great team. I too have had the absolute displeasure of working with a host of other gateways, and it's easy to separated Balanced & Stripe from the rest of the pack. They are both in another league when it comes to ease of use, integration and features. However, for a marketplace with any volume, the ability to change the soft descriptor for charges across different merchant accounts is a non-negotiable necessity. You can find this gem in Balanced Docs: appears_on_statement_as: optional string. Text that will appear on the buyer's statement. Characters that can be used are limited to...:(https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/api?language=bash#...) Just try charging a few hundred credit cards with a generic descriptor and the wave of charge-backs will help you to understand the importance.

Yeah, getting the statement text right makes a big difference. FWIW, Payouts was mostly designed for user-facing services (Lyft, Exec, Homejoy et al) where they want their own name to appear on card statements. If you're using Connect, each seller would have their own Stripe account and could have different card statement text.

We use stripe for our app, http://follower.io, and it was sooo simple to get setup! I love how their docs even adapt to your account, showing you API calls with your keys already in it!

Stripe team will give a talk about it Saturday in SF, on Building APIs for Developers, with design best practices explanations http://sf.apidays.io