avibryant
I'm super interested in this space, including in helping financially support some projects. I already emailed Ted about this, but would be happy to chat to anyone doing this stuff. My email's in my profile.
(Luckily this is niche enough I'm not worried about my inbox blowing up....)
Is adding inference on the roadmap?
Search & Query Infrastructure Engineers
I'm helping build a new team for Stripe in a new Seattle engineering office. We're focused on building distributed, scalable infrastructure for user-facing search and reporting-related features of Stripe's product. This is an opportunity to work on new, high-impact projects in a small team, while supported by the scale of Stripe's overall engineering organization and business.
Apply here: https://stripe.com/jobs/positions/engineer-seattle This describes our interview process: https://stripe.com/jobs/engineering-onsite.pdf
Feel free to also ping me directly at [email protected].
(BTW, since recruiters probably read these threads, we are also hiring technical recruiters in Seattle: https://stripe.com/jobs/positions/technical-recruiter-seattl...)
(I may be biased here: I work for Stripe from a small community off the Canadian coast).
Each new payment method comes with its own constraints. We'll always try to give our users as many options as possible while working within those constraints. The constraints with Alipay are particularly tight, and for now the only way we can satisfy them is through checkout.js - but over time, if we can relax that, we will. We're definitely not moving to a model where Checkout is always the first or only way to integrate a new feature. For example, the two other alternative payment methods we have in beta right now are ACH and Bitcoin, neither of which are built into Checkout. We do hope to eventually support both of these in Checkout, of course, but in those cases, it was easiest to do the API first; in the Alipay case, it was by far the easiest thing to do Checkout first.
However, it's possible that we could do a special alipay.js, which I think is what you're getting at with #2. This wouldn't be Stripe Checkout, exactly, but a standalone Alipay product where we provide the UI is certainly something we'd think about down the line. We don't have any specific plans here but feel free to email me at [email protected] if you want to talk more about that.
Can you say more about "(a) stable"? If you mean that you've had problems with robustness or availability, I'd love to hear about that, because in general we believe it's been very good on those fronts.
If you mean that it the UI changes from time to time, then (for better or worse), that's a fundamental property of Checkout: we are continually iterating and optimizing and adding new features (like Alipay!). We do understand that it's not for everyone, but a lot of people use it for exactly that reason.
How often do you actually buy things online with interac? I think I've maybe done it once, and the redirect-to-the-bank flow is pretty awkward. My sense is that this isn't ever a barrier to conversion for Canadians (except maybe for very large purchases?), but I'd be curious to hear otherwise.
[1] https://github.com/twitter/scalding/wiki/Type-safe-api-refer...
I don't think it's so much that there's no market for it as that the market is very hard to reach and we had no good channel. Intuit's Quickbase is a very healthy business, because they have a channel to millions of SMBs. We didn't, and didn't know how to build one, so we grew much more slowly (though I should say that by most sane, non-valley standards we were doing just fine, thanks ;)
I learned a lot of things at Dabble, but I think the biggest lesson was that the three most important things in B2B software are distribution, distribution, and distribution.
Wait, what?