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Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pc on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:21PM (#9200145)
Stripe cofounder here. I just wanted to tip our hats to the folks at Balanced. Stripe and Balanced have certainly competed against each other in the marketplace space for a few years, but we have a lot of respect for how Matin and his team executed with creatively and determination. While we're of course glad Balanced decided that migrating to Stripe was the best thing for their users, today is kinda bittersweet for us.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by akoumjian on Friday March 13, 2015 @07:07PM (#9200671)
Please consider a way to "prefund" amounts in escrow. Or at least existing Balanced escrow accounts. You'll see it all over the comments here. Using a CC to load money into Stripe is much too expensive, when you are paying out marketplace amounts in large sums. We provide Net30 Invoicing for buyers, but immediately payout to our sellers on our marketplace. Not being able to preload a large balance is going to make things very difficult for us.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by keithwhor on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:29PM (#9200208)
Any plans for escrow services? That was the one pain point balanced tackled that Stripe has yet to provide a solution for.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pc on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:32PM (#9200224)
You can control the transfer schedule for your recipients, which should effectively cover what you need to do. (Sorry this isn't clearer in the docs.) Feel free to email us, too. I'm [email protected].
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by ewang1 on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:37PM (#9200257)
Any chance you guys are going to support funding the marketplace balance via the bank account?
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by keithwhor on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:36PM (#9200246)
Great, will do. Good work on the PR, jumping on this. I'm sure you'll have a ton of e-mails today from this comment --- maybe I'll wait a week or two. :)
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by bbissoon on Saturday March 14, 2015 @12:32PM (#9203142)
It's not the same at all. There's a "Pending" balance and an "Available" balance.

If you were to initiate a transfer after a successful charge, you will get an error. You have to wait days for it to make it to your available balance and transfer then.

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by elwell on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:55PM (#9200333)
Your comment came off as a humblebrag at first, but then I read the link and saw that they mentioned transitioning customer to Stripe. So, if anyone had the same reaction as me; just read the link first.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pc on Friday March 13, 2015 @06:06PM (#9200396)
Hm, I can see what you mean -- edited to make clear what our involvement is. (I.e., the migration.)
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by bbissoon on Friday March 13, 2015 @06:09PM (#9200411)
With the migration, will our data be replicated or ported over to Stripe? I.E. We start the migration and we still have access to Balanced API while we make the needed changes to comply and test with Stripe.

I want to start the migration, but don't want to lose access to Balanced all together until we're ready...

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by mtamizi on Friday March 13, 2015 @06:16PM (#9200443)
You can start the migration process and continue to use Balanced. Your existing cards, bank accounts, and seller data will be ported to Stripe, and all new cards, bank accounts, and sellers that you create on Balanced will be mirrored on Stripe.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by plug on Friday March 13, 2015 @05:46PM (#9200295)
Weird. I was only looking at the Balanced site for the first time yesterday, researching payment services that offer ACH. I understand Stripe has an ACH implementation in private beta though?

Greetings from a fellow "Limerician" btw :)

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by tbrooks on Friday March 13, 2015 @06:21PM (#9200457)
pc, it appears that the Stripe client libraries do not support Balanced-like features.

i.e. ACH debits, marketplaces, etc.

Migrating over to Stripe sounds great, but having these libraries updated with the proper endpoints seems like a must.

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by bkrausz on Friday March 13, 2015 @06:33PM (#9200525)
Our bindings actually do support ACH debits. The "source" parameter is a universal param for any kind of incoming payment mechanism. See https://stripe.com/blog/unifying-payment-types-in-the-api for details.

Specifically, for those in the ACH beta you can put a customer's bank account token in that field to charge their bank account.

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by tbrooks on Friday March 13, 2015 @06:38PM (#9200546)
Will I have the ability to debit ACH w/o verification?

(I currently have this ability with Balanced. Also have very low fraud, chargeback, etc.)

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by tbrooks on Friday March 13, 2015 @07:06PM (#9200667)
Ahh, you're right.

To make an ACH debit, you'd need to verify a bank account beforehand. And I don't think client libraries support a `bank account resource` w/o curling.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by mintplant on Friday March 13, 2015 @07:45PM (#9200803)
If you don't get it working on Stripe, maybe you'll have better luck with WePay. They're a marketplace payments service like Balanced was, and they support ACH payments.

https://www.wepay.com/developer/facilitate_withdrawals/settl...

https://www.wepay.com/developer/facilitate_withdrawals/embed...

Disclaimer: I haven't actually used them myself. YMMV.

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by coconutrandom on Friday March 13, 2015 @08:07PM (#9200873)
I have used them, stick with Stripe.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by billclerico on Saturday March 14, 2015 @01:41AM (#9201660)
WePay cofounder here. Would love to better understand why you say that so we can improve. [email protected]
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pbreit on Friday March 13, 2015 @09:42PM (#9201206)
WePay doesn't do ACH debits AFAIK.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by vasusen on Friday March 13, 2015 @11:59PM (#9201503)
WePay engineer here. We support ACH debits. Checkout the live example with "Pay with Bank Account" option here - https://www.wepay.com/developer/process_payments/iframe-chec...
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pbreit on Saturday March 14, 2015 @12:25AM (#9201553)
I was thinking via API.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by HalfLifeDM on Saturday March 14, 2015 @11:05AM (#9202841)
I know that Balanced was using Forte for their ACH processing. You might check them out.

https://www.forte.net/devdocs/api_resources/forte_api.htm

Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by sluzorz on Saturday March 14, 2015 @11:16AM (#9202871)
This is absolutely not true
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by HalfLifeDM on Saturday March 14, 2015 @11:31AM (#9202933)
Ask Balanced to confirm for yourself. We are Forte are very saddened to see them go, but will continue to support them and their ACH processing until the day that they turn out the lights.
[dead]
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pbreit on Saturday March 14, 2015 @12:24AM (#9201551)
Don't be such a jerk. First, contact Stripe support which is typically very responsive. Second, if you're going to post here, best to assume positive intent.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by pc on Friday March 13, 2015 @11:19PM (#9201436)
Hm, apologies -- we don't have any policy against that. Feel free to drop me a note with more details and I'll investigate. [email protected].
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by mst on Saturday March 14, 2015 @12:13AM (#9201524)
That's normally perfectly fine, except when banks fuck it up.
Re:Balanced payments is shutting down by quadrangle on Friday March 13, 2015 @11:52PM (#9201488)
Although you should be doing it anyway, you should especially want to be friendly in on-boarding the transitioning customers… so PLEASE release all of Stripe's client-side JavaScript as free/libre/open software so that GNU LibreJS recognizes it.

In other words, while I and many others may wish you to actually get to Balanced's level of public commitment to transparency, the essential item is to allow people to simply use Stripe without being forced to run non-free code on their own machines client-side. Fixing this is as simple as making the source just for the client-side JS be available under an appropriate license and including some header or license file indicating this appropriately.

Please consider this, it will win you a lot of good will and is the right thing to do.