Well, not if we are talking about "super-dollars" or other high quality forgeries.
For argument sake, imagine the most sketchy character you can conjure in your mind and let's say he ask you to change a 50 in 10s. Would you trade him 5 of your 10s for one of his 50?
I was really looking forward to Stripe implementing SEPA Direct Debit and moving away from my current provider, but at the moment the offering has 2 serious flaws compared to other services:
1) Pricing. Direct Debit usually has the advantage of being cheaper than cards, usually a small percentage with no fixed fee. I was expecting something like the US ACH fee (0.8%) or a fixed 1% maybe. 1.4% + €0.25 is pretty expensive compared to your main SEPA competitor (GoCardless is just 1% up to €2). The fixed fee makes it less competitive for smaller payment amounts, which is usually one of the SEPA DD advantages.
2) Own Creditor Identifier requirement. GoCardless allows using your own identifier under their Pro offering, but you can also use their own shared identifier as an individual or small business. One of the main advantages of using Stripe is avoiding traditional banks, but getting an ID requires dealing with them and is pretty cumbersome or even not possible in some banks, specially for non-business accounts (and they also expect to handle your direct debits, not just provide you with an ID).
2/ On creditor identifiers: having your own creditor identifier makes your business more visible to customers on their bank statement, and can reduce the risk of chargebacks which are inherent to SEPA Direct Debit. True, you need to get one—possibly something we hope to help with in the future—but banks cannot force you to process SEPA debits with them. It is their duty to provide one to you. If you're not a business, there can be reasons to proceed with caution on SEPA Direct Debit, not least of which is the risk of chargebacks. I'd love to hear more about your case to see how Stripe can improve: my company email is just gabriel@.
I'm interested in the nordic countries especially norway and denmark where nets are the most used payment provider.
One business case is that I'm currently working for a company with a fairly large public email service. We have a lot of difficulty handling subscriptions on our current payment provider "epay" who like you is an abstraction on top of the card procider nets.
Not OP but if you added the British Crown Dependencies (Channel Islands, Isle of Man) you would have some very happy clients here. These aren't the biggest markets and they are frequently ignored. However some larger tech companies like AWS, OVH, and DigitalOcean do serve this market and correctly handle our UK VAT exempt status. Fingers crossed...
Hi herbst - thanks for the note. No immediate release dates for that but we are focused on offering straightforward integration solutions that cover as many of the payment methods we support as possible.
All i wanted to hear, i really love your service and checkout.js is so easy to integrate. When i go for the other options as well i could almost roll my own with the same amount of time (not really, but you get the point). It would be really awesome to see at least PayPal and maybe Bitcoin in the available options for the checkout.
Hi @wolfgke! I work at Stripe. You're right about the importance to cover other relevant payment methods locally. Happy to chat more about our SEPA debits plans, feel free to get in touch: I'm just gabriel at stripe dot com.
The rest of the world (including a significant portion of EU) still isn't, though. You can sell from basically anywhere with PayPal or FastSpring, not so with Stripe.
(I work for Stripe) Hey! Yes we're definitely aware of the need to take into account local payment landscapes that can be quite specific (you rightly mentioned iDEAL in the Netherlands, there's also EPS in Austria, Bancontact/MrCash in Belgium, to name a few others in Europe...). We're working on this and I'd be happy to connect to learn more about your needs. My email is just gabriel at, feel free to reach out!
Will definitely give it a spin, Trello's an important part of our workflow and it's not optimal to resort to cmd+shft+4 and then a ctrl-c/ctrl-v... Thanks for sharing!
