It is pretty clear by now Stripe has big guns pointed at enterprise customers. What others like Checkout.com, Adyen thought was a relatively safe moat, has now clearly disappeared.
However, I'm sorry to always be the sour grapes guy when it comes to talking about Stripe neglecting us SMEs.
I'm pretty sure a lot of these things mentioned in the article are being passed down to "regular" customers, but to be honest, it lately hasn't felt like that.
Last year there were a few price spikes, Radar fees that were initially negotiated where reinstated, same for refund fees.
Radar works great when it does, but has a lot of wonky stuff like not catching heavy carders which defeats the purpose of using rules.
Acceptance rates internationally are still lacking. If you have a European Stripe account, billing US customers will not provide the same acceptance rates as if you use a US account.
In some Latam countries the difference can be important.
Stripe is vital to our growth, but it is a complicated marriage.
I really hope they don't forget about us, the regular merchants.
Edwin from Stripe here. Postmates started using Stripe as an SME, when they were probably smaller than your company. We’ve been scaling alongside them for the past decade, and the auth optimization features mentioned in the post weren’t built for them—they’re built for and used by businesses of all sizes. In fact, Radar’s ML was designed to become better as the network grows—the more card transactions it sees, the more effective it becomes (imagine the fraud data we learn from every Postmates transaction can be applied to your transactions too!). This is one of the principles of Stripe—and it’s our goal to help scale your company’s growth, just like Postmate’s.
That said, could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can take another look at the issues you mentioned? (For example, we honor rates for their negotiated term.)
The card issuers do their individual basic fraud detection (e.g. security code) but we built our own on top after users asked for something more advanced. Imagine Stripe seeing data across all the card networks, compound that with customer info (like email or IP, which card networks don’t always collect) across all businesses on Stripe, then that’s fed into our ML network that’s constantly tuned by Stripe engineers. And then businesses have the opportunity to customize all that with Radar.
True, but the big networks process far more transactions than stripe does, have access to more data (where else has this card been used lately, has the bill been paid, has this customer used the card in a shop abroad, etc), and seem in a better position overall to combat fraud.
The network also has access to the account holders phone number so can actually call to validate risky transactions.
Lower fraud rates would also make issuing banks more likely to choose visa over MasterCard, so be a competitive advantage.
> If you have a European Stripe account, billing US customers will not provide the same acceptance rates as if you use a US account.
Is this due to Stripe or due to the credit card providers blocking transactions? I ask because I have a card that routinely declines charges if I am not near my home. (I can temporarily expand "home" by adding travel plans in their app, but it's inconvenient.)
I might be oversimplifying but when you pay with a US card at a European Stripe Merchant, the acquirer they use locally will show up at your US Bank as "foreign", and this will trigger all sorts of things at the fraud/compliance level.
Stripe offers Atlas so you can "easily" open a US Stripe account and serve your US customers from there, but wouldn't it be great if Stripe did that for you automatically?
Yes I feel roughly the same. Our experience as an EU stripe merchant with charging US cards is pretty great though. 97%+ acceptance if I recall... Brazil however is a very sore point. We hope to localize to Spanish and reach Latam though so we’re a bit worried. We heard it’s better than Brazil.
We’re still a tiny B2C though, so we definitely feel the complicated marriage side of things. Not to mention PayPal. The missing elephant in the room.
Brazilian dev with some experience in developing systems used across LatAm.
Honestly, it is a mess...
There are specific payment methods that are common in a single country where people prefer to use that instead of credit cards, as a result sometimes we have to integrate a bunch of different payment processors, a couple of them with non-existent or terrible documentation which result in a ton of emails and calls to clarify stuff.
Stripe is in Beta in Brazil for a while but I never developed something with it for the local market, there is a countrywide processor here that have great documentation and support everything that Brazilian customers are used to and the fees are in the same ballpark, so there's no need to use it.
> We heard it’s better than Brazil.
Which is funny for me, integrating payment processors in Brazil isn't a big deal and I had a lot of trouble with a few LatAm processors, but if I had to guess the reason I would say that a lot of old cards and cards for people with low income used to be national only, they couldn't pay anything in other currencies, nowadays the card situation is a bit better and most issued cards can purchase international goods but since stripe apparently is coming to Brazil, if you could process your payments through it it should work flawlessly.
However, I'm sorry to always be the sour grapes guy when it comes to talking about Stripe neglecting us SMEs.
I'm pretty sure a lot of these things mentioned in the article are being passed down to "regular" customers, but to be honest, it lately hasn't felt like that.
Last year there were a few price spikes, Radar fees that were initially negotiated where reinstated, same for refund fees.
Radar works great when it does, but has a lot of wonky stuff like not catching heavy carders which defeats the purpose of using rules.
Acceptance rates internationally are still lacking. If you have a European Stripe account, billing US customers will not provide the same acceptance rates as if you use a US account. In some Latam countries the difference can be important.
Stripe is vital to our growth, but it is a complicated marriage.
I really hope they don't forget about us, the regular merchants.