Recent experiences with Stripe?

YmpkerYmpker OGContent Writer

Currently working on a Woocommerce store for a client and when it comes to choosing a payment gateaway/processor, there are various options, where the most prominent ones appear to be Stripe or PayPal Payments. Now, I have heard so-so things about Stripe. Any recent experiences?

Comments

  • edited December 2022

    Stripe has very weak fraud protection. Even with their paid(!) anti-fraud service it is still subpar. If your niche is a bit on higher end of risk (web hosting is high risk business) - eventually you will be booted. Stripe support sucks. It is insanely bad. Caned responses, forwarding loops between "departments" and eventual closure / ignorance of the ticket.

    If you consider your clientele has some risk - avoid Stripe.

    Now PayPal. Ou boy, so much controversy on those monkeys. Yes, they are real monkeys. But their anti-fraud system is light years above Stripe's. Just never ever store money in PayPal. Daily dumping your precious dollars is the key to success. PayPal is so so for hosting. If your niche is low rish - take them. At least PayPal support can pick up your call in UK.

    Overall, the best solution would be to use your local e-bank service. Where do you live?

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  • edited December 2022

    Don’t use Stripe for WooCommerce. They are wired in fraud detection. They can even auto refund your clients without your permission. If you are selling physical goods, and you already delivered the product to the customer, but suddenly Stripe fraud detection automatically refunded the payment to the customer. How will you feel?

    If you are building a website only for a specific market/region, then get the domestic payment methods instead.

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  • YmpkerYmpker OGContent Writer

    @legendary said:
    Stripe has very weak fraud protection. Even with their paid(!) anti-fraud service it is still subpar. If your niche is a bit on higher end of risk (web hosting is high risk business) - eventually you will be booted. Stripe support sucks. It is insanely bad. Caned responses, forwarding loops between "departments" and eventual closure / ignorance of the ticket.

    If you consider your clientele has some risk - avoid Stripe.

    Thanks for the feedback! That doesn't sound too much in favour of Stripe, lol.

    Now PayPal. Ou boy, so much controversy on those monkeys. Yes, they are real monkeys. But their anti-fraud system is light years above Stripe's. Just never ever store money in PayPal. Daily dumping your precious dollars is the key to success. PayPal is so so for hosting. If your niche is low rish - take them. At least PayPal support can pick up your call in UK.

    >

    That's what I expected to hear. At least PP has phone support though, which in Germany (where I live) at least was quite "okay" the two times I called them.

    Overall, the best solution would be to use your local e-bank service. Where do you live?

    Germany

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  • Disclaimer: I've not used any of these apart from paying others.

    I'd have thought stripe would win if you need to receive international payments as it allows you to collect VAT at the correct rate without much effort (at least according to the docs). From what I can tell, with paypal you have to do this yourself, and probably local banks will only accept your local currency.

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  • Off topic: Consider using OpenCart = a bit less bloat than Woo.
    (I predominantly host e-commerce, using a number of different packages, including those two. Magento? Just don't - had to dedicate a whole VPS to that!)

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  • @Ympker said: Germany

    Mollie. The best API, documentation and overall service quality. Entirely different experience from all those Stripe, PayPal etc.

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  • YmpkerYmpker OGContent Writer
    edited December 2022

    @ralf said:
    Disclaimer: I've not used any of these apart from paying others.

    I'd have thought stripe would win if you need to receive international payments as it allows you to collect VAT at the correct rate without much effort (at least according to the docs). From what I can tell, with paypal you have to do this yourself, and probably local banks will only accept your local currency.

    Ah, will have to check that, though I expect mostly 90% of genuine orders coming from Germany, so PayPal/CC/Sofort/SEPA payments.

    @legendary said:

    @Ympker said: Germany

    Mollie. The best API, documentation and overall service quality. Entirely different experience from all those Stripe, PayPal etc.

    Will check it out, thanks! :)

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    Off topic: Consider using OpenCart = a bit less bloat than Woo.
    (I predominantly host e-commerce, using a number of different packages, including those two. Magento? Just don't - had to dedicate a whole VPS to that!)

    Will also have a look! The name rings a bell :D

  • My opinion differs. Talking from experience, Stripe works fantastic with WooCommerce directly. WooCommerce Payment, also process payments through stripe. I prefer the direct route with the Stripe WooCommerce plugin.

    You should never have only one way to process payments. You will find that there are customers that prefers to input credit card and be done and others that prefer PayPal. Some people believe that you must have a PayPal account to pay, not knowing that you can guest checkout in PayPal and an account is not required (depending on the settings).

    In regards to E-commerce, Woocommerce is at the top along with the top players. Is one of the easiest, it runs well (from experience).

    As a note. Shopify a SaaS E-commerce, probably one of the top competitors to WooCommerce, also uses Stripe with their Shopify Payments.

    Stripe is everywhere. In regards to fraud protection, you can turn on RADAR feature and configure rules that applies to your business.

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  • edited December 2022

    @Hxxx said: You should never have only one way to process payments. You will find that there are customers that prefers to input credit card and be done and others that prefer PayPal.

    Totally agree.

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  • YmpkerYmpker OGContent Writer

    @Hxxx said:
    My opinion differs. Talking from experience, Stripe works fantastic with WooCommerce directly. WooCommerce Payment, also process payments through stripe. I prefer the direct route with the Stripe WooCommerce plugin.

    You should never have only one way to process payments. You will find that there are customers that prefers to input credit card and be done and others that prefer PayPal. Some people believe that you must have a PayPal account to pay, not knowing that you can guest checkout in PayPal and an account is not required (depending on the settings).

    In regards to E-commerce, Woocommerce is at the top along with the top players. Is one of the easiest, it runs well (from experience).

    As a note. Shopify a SaaS E-commerce, probably one of the top competitors to WooCommerce, also uses Stripe with their Shopify Payments.

    Stripe is everywhere. In regards to fraud protection, you can turn on RADAR feature and configure rules that applies to your business.

    Yeah, appears like Woocommerce is THE storefront for WordPress sites, anyway. I also considered Shopify Starter plan as an alternative, but since everything is on WP already and I assume you have more flexibility if you actually "own" the store, I decided to go with Woocommerce. Will check out both options more thoroughly. Regarding Woocommerce Payment also using Stripe, I saw that, too. Saw way more ppl had Stripe plugin installed rather than Woocommerce Payments and figured the direct way would be more efficient. So likely would also use the Stripe plugin if I opted for that.

  • rubenruben Hosting Provider

    Using Stripe for quite some time now. They provide a lot of statistics and good reports, payout time is reasonably fast as well, and card acceptance is large and they provide many security and check features too. It can also accept/integrate CB, SEPA direct, AliPay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, WeChat, etc.
    Overall I'm very happy with it - can only recommend it so far.

    There is also Braintree (PayPal), which works too - but personally, I don't like the interface too much.

    Fee-wise the card processer are mostly about the same to start with, around 2.9% + ~0.40/transaction which is still a lot better than the basic PayPal merchant fees at 3.49% + ~0.40

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  • edited December 2022

    Never freaking ever use Stripe. They only have support by bot-chat which is most of the time little help (if your ticket is redirected to a "human" it's being ignored). Their refund policy is very customer oriented as already mentioned. Another thing I experience, they asked me to identify myself for payout several times and I was showing them everytime the same documents which they accepted and then release my account and short time later they locked the account again and asked for the same documents I provided them a couple weeks ago and then they accepted this documents again and so on.. I suppose in this whole process there was never a human involved and their auth bot had some failures hence I landed in kind of a circle.
    PayPal has really good support imo, also virtually everybody has an PayPal account or has a PayDirect Account (in Germany) which you can use at PayPal without signing up. If you're within EU getting your account locked isn't a that big risk I think because most of the time I read those complains from people outside the EU and even without knowing it in detail, I'm pretty sure the EU has stricter laws regarding this. PayPal Europe has different processes than PayPal Limited I was told a while ago when selling at eBay (like a year ago when they still had PayPal). If you attract too many shady transactions, I wouldn't rely on it though. Stripe is more leniend.

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  • skorupionskorupion Services Provider

    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

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  • YmpkerYmpker OGContent Writer

    @skorupion said:
    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

    Lol

  • skorupionskorupion Services Provider

    @Ympker said:

    @skorupion said:
    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

    Lol

    Also, he accidentally hang up :lol:

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  • YmpkerYmpker OGContent Writer

    @skorupion said:

    @Ympker said:

    @skorupion said:
    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

    Lol

    Also, he accidentally hang up :lol:

    That's the worst if you get back in queue

  • skorupionskorupion Services Provider

    @Ympker said:

    @skorupion said:

    @Ympker said:

    @skorupion said:
    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

    Lol

    Also, he accidentally hang up :lol:

    That's the worst if you get back in queue

    Nah he called me right back

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  • @skorupion said:
    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

    Covid19 era?? Sounds like something you would experience if I was the operator hahah. Like "Fuck this dude is calling", then answering with patchy voice and flu symptoms, waking up because fell sleep in the chair

  • skorupionskorupion Services Provider

    @Hxxx said:

    @skorupion said:
    You can use stripe, but maybe consider some other fraud risk plugin or something. Their support ain't the worst (once when I called at like 11 PM my time, I literally woke up this dude, and needed to wait until he turned on his interface LOL)

    Covid19 era?? Sounds like something you would experience if I was the operator hahah. Like "Fuck this dude is calling", then answering with patchy voice and flu symptoms, waking up because fell sleep in the chair

    Deadass sounded like this but I get him, actually helped me and we were cool with it, and had a nice laugh about this

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