Stripe Button (beta)

by firefoxman1 • 14 years ago

289 159 14 years ago

This looks so awesome! I'm really excited to add this to my projects.

mratzloff• 14 years ago

I really like Stripe. They're working hard to make payments work as well as GitHub does for source control, and this is yet another really useful tool. They're not perfect--we still encounter bugs occasionally--but they're responsive and friendly. Goes a long way.

markgarity• 14 years ago

Well done Stripe! Love the creativity and dedication towards simplifying every possible approach to payment processing.

recuter3• 14 years ago

Outstanding.

However, one tiny nitpick: The Stripe brand is not equivalent to paypal and other common payment options, it doesn't yet mean anything to most people. The button saying "Pay with Stripe" might confuse people or not convert optimally, perhaps let the text be customized?

mrschwabe• 14 years ago

That was my first concern as well. This is a great feature, as long as we can customize the button, otherwise I'm not really excited to share this with customers. As much as I love Stripe, my customers want a way to "Pay with credit card" not "Pay with Stripe".

darkmethod• 14 years ago

I'd like to reiterate how important this point is. Not being able to edit the button text is the only hang up I have from implementing the "Stripe" button.

Stripe Team: Well done otherwise. Love it.

pclark• 14 years ago

The Stripe brand is not equivalent to paypal yet

recuter3• 14 years ago

Hear, hear. I actually wrote just that at first but dropped yet by mistake when I reworded my post. Not yet, but here's hoping.

jcoder• 14 years ago

Even when the brand is as big as PayPal, I think that the OP's point stands. When you "Pay with PayPal," you are generally using your PayPal account. You don't need a Stripe account to pay, so you're not paying "with Stripe." PayPal is the system, Stripe is an implementation detail.

rscale2• 14 years ago

It's pretty much a showstopper for me.

I think they need to start with something like 'Pay with Credit Card <br/><small>powered by Stripe</small>', and as their brand grows switch the emphasis to their brand and away from the word Credit Card.

mintplant• 14 years ago

If you haven't checked back already, they fixed this. See upstream in the thread.

mehulkar2• 14 years ago

Agreed. Hope they don't pull a twitter and require devs to use their buttons.

slykat• 14 years ago

Yea, I agree - if you are accepting payments from non-developers it's probably going to damage your conversion rate. Having an option for a "Powered by Stripe" logo would probably be a better way to build brand awareness.

This will probably confuse consumers until Stripe has the brand awareness of Paypal.

boucher6• 14 years ago

We are working on making the text customizable right now. The button is still a bit of an experiment, so we're taking in feedback and iterating.

nodesocket• 14 years ago

Love to have the button text customizable as well. Awesome work though.

maccman2• 14 years ago

Hi, I'm the developer behind the button

Yes, I absolutely agree. We're redesigning that part of the button, and allowing people to specify various options, such as 'Pay', 'Add Card', 'Checkout' etc.

mikegirouard• 14 years ago

Howdy. Thanks for not minifying the JS[1].

When it comes to payment-related code, I wouldn't even consider it an option for my shop w/o reviewing it. Was that by design or will it be minified in the future?

[1] https://button.stripe.com/v1/button.js

recuter3• 14 years ago

Great. While I have your ear I just want to reiterate that the text should be completely customizable, presets to select from are better then nothing but don't make sense.

Who knows what usage people might dream up, what wording works best for their unique case, or hell, different languages. In my humble opinion, everything about the button should be overridable.

pinchyfingers• 14 years ago

I'm using the Stripe button and loving it. I don't mind promoting the Stripe brand, especially when you guys reach the point of adding value because of already established consumer trust, but I'm glad to hear that I'll be able to change the text on the button. Any idea how long until the feature is available?

MichaelApproved• 14 years ago

In your HN profile, it says you work for Twitter. Do you currently work for both Stripe and Twitter?

jhull• 14 years ago

I agree with you if the button is standing alone, but if its a "Pay with Stripe" button alongside a Paypal and Google Checkout button then I think it adds more street cred than is taken away.

zrail• 14 years ago

I would love this feature. I'm going to go ahead with implementation even without it, but being able to customize the text would make it that much better.

obeattie• 14 years ago

For me, it would be great if the entire button was replaceable with my own link, not just the text (ie. if I could style it with CSS to my heart's content)

bdr3• 14 years ago

Nice. In the next step, could Stripe start cookie-ing people to remember their payment info across sites?

tucaz• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure a cookie wouldn't be the safest idea in the world to hold these kind of information

Kudos3• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure they meant that the cookie would be a token and not contain the actual data.

pc86• 14 years ago

Let me get this straight, you want a Stripe cookie that remembers a user's payment information across unrelated websites?

bdr3• 14 years ago

Yes, like Facebook Connect. This would in fact be more secure than the current solution.

duiker101• 14 years ago

The more I Stripe the more I die inside looking at my Paypal websites.... Please bring it to the EU(at least the UK)

knighthacker2• 14 years ago

Agreed. Paypal is flat out painful. But they certainly have a huge advantage when it comes to international payment processing.

LordIllidan• 14 years ago

A 100 times this. And not just the UK please!

Actually, I'd be interested to know what are the main obstacles in launching this service internationally. Is it mainly bureaucracy and legal issues, or are there yet other considerations?

degenerate• 14 years ago

There seems to be a bug in Chrome when the javascript validates my MM input. Notice that MM is impossible (66) yet it highlights the YY box (which is valid): http://i.imgur.com/iHYFe.jpg

tomx• 14 years ago

Does Stripe ask for any more information than that available on the card?

Normally I'm asked for at least a Post Code, which I assume is part of reducing fraud, through making it a bit more difficult to use a stolen card.

pfraze2• 14 years ago

EDIT: to avoid any FUD, there's no problem with the URL; as the replies say, the path of the target URL is encrypted under SSL.

---

ORIGINAL: I have a question about the security of the button, though I may be wrong. The outgoing request is a GET with the credit card info in plain-text as a query parameter. With it went all of the cookies in the origin's domain.

GET https://api.stripe.com/v1/tokens?key=W1xyC0XilnJTkz52noGj1Hh...

The SSL keeps the cookies safe from loggers, but not from stripe. The URL, however, is not protected from anybody, right?

naz• 14 years ago

HTTPS URLs are encrypted along with the rest of the request.

callmevlad• 14 years ago

If a web designer adds this script to a non-HTTPS page, is that still the case?

jonknee2• 14 years ago

That is interesting, the form is a POST, must be Javascript doing the GET in its place. I wonder what the technical advantage of GET is in this case.

jtolj• 14 years ago

Maybe has something to do with this: https://stripe.com/blog/stripejs-and-jsonp (they mention JSONP only supporting GET requests)?

exogen• 14 years ago

The technical advantage is getting around the same-origin policy by using JSONP (which by its nature can only be used with GET requests for the script).

Cushman2• 14 years ago

The path part of the URL is encrypted along with the rest of the request. Only the DNS lookup (i.e., the hostname) is in the clear.

pfraze2• 14 years ago

Okay, thanks for clearing that up for me.

mjschultz• 14 years ago

Wouldn't stripe's server logs also have the get params in cleartext?

aneth4• 14 years ago

The path and parameters of the URL are part of the HTTP conversation that is encrypted.

In a simple sense, only the host name and IP address are not protected.

lftl• 14 years ago

Isn't the hostname encrypted as well? My understanding was that's the reason you have to have a unique IP for SSL and can't rely on a vhost setup.

jaemccall• 14 years ago

SSL encrypts the query string. The only thing in the clear on the wire is the domain name (api.stripe.com). Although there may be other ways for GET query data to leak out (bookmarks, plugins...)

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

Even the domain name (in the Host header) will be encrypted (unless SNI is used? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)

boucher6• 14 years ago

Cookies are only sent for the domain involved in the request, so only stripe.com cookies would be sent to Stripe, not any cookies for the domain hosting this button.

untog• 14 years ago

Still seems like a bad idea to use GET, though- those URLs often appear in logs. POST bodies do not.

toomuchtodo2• 14 years ago

DevOps here. You scrub those out.

knighthacker2• 14 years ago

I love it. Well executed. My only comment is to make the text on the button customizable.

plainOldText• 14 years ago

In my opinion the button resembles a regular bootstrap button. I think Stripe ought to give this button a little creative touch to make it instantly recognizable; you know, building the brand recognition thing. When I see the Paypal button i instantly know what I'm clicking on.

alpb2• 14 years ago

I see an empty space on IE 10, could anybody post a screenshot please?

maccman2• 14 years ago

Could you contact me at alex@stripe.com and we can get this resolved. Thanks!

alpb2• 14 years ago

Seems to be resolved, cool.

dm8• 14 years ago

I use Stripe on our website for payments and it's beautiful. I agree that Stripe is still not that well known outside tech/geek circles. But it will be very useful for one-time payment type of websites/blogs and I'm sure it will give lot of brand lift to Stripe in non-tech users.

To Stripe Folks: It would be great to have "Powered by Stripe" badge so that developers can show that payments are taken care by Stripe.

gawker5• 14 years ago

I'd love to hear the security implications of the button. Seems to me that someone could easily replicate this and trick users into entering their credit card number. Am I wrong? Are there any other avenues of attack? I have an idea about something similar but since I'm no security expert, I'd love to hear what more experienced hackers think.

X-Istence• 14 years ago

Phishing attacks have always been possible and will continue to be possible.

Having people enter their credit card details into random online sites is always going to stick around as long as eCommerce exists. You don't have to put a Stripe button on your site for that to work.

In other words, no more insecure than any eCommerce site.

kennu• 14 years ago

It's not more insecure, but it seems impossible for the end-user to know whether a Stripe form that just popped up is real or fake. Whereas you can first redirect the user to a well-known payment site, where they can verify the site's identity from the SSL info in the URL bar, before trusting it to enter their credit card data.

frio• 14 years ago

I strongly agree, and wish I could upvote you more. Before I enter CC details on any site, I check: is it HTTPS? Is the domain correct? The average user might not, sure, but it's there for those of us who do.

This abstracts that away. Creating a duplicate popup would be trivial, and harvesting data -- while appearing "trusted" -- is easier this way than the other way (because you don't even need to bother faking a domain).

I hope the Stripe people are taking this into consideration.

gawker5• 14 years ago

I'm glad someone doesn't think I'm paranoid. We're dealing with money at work and someone thought of the same concept - make it look clean and make it look cool but there's no real way to let a user know that this is legit. I'd love to hear and discuss what Stripe has in mind (Don't worry, we're not in competition :) )

rubergly• 14 years ago

Looks great. I can only imagine that this is the first step towards allowing users to store their credit card information securely with Stripe and not have to pass it through every merchant site. I can't wait until the day that Stripe's ease of use for developers meets (and exceeds) Paypal's ease of use for customers.

davesmylie• 14 years ago

Every time I see yet another Stripe post on HN, I get all sad all over again knowing they have no real plans to launch in NZ (or any other country afaik).

After a year or so of waiting they have expanded to only one other country (Canada), and they still completely avoid talking about future expansion other than a token "We are working on expanding into other countries" sort of answer =/

Very cool looking project, but looking more and more like it's never going to be able to used by the majority of the world... (ie any developers living outside of the USA).

pc2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry. It's really frustrating for us too. To the extent it helps, Canada is very much just a first step for us. We're actively working on a number of countries—including New Zealand specifically.

mcdowall• 14 years ago

Just wondering (*hoping) the UK is in that small list of countries too?

evoxed• 14 years ago

Is Asia being considered at this point? I would expect the English market to be top priority but I'm sure there are at least a few Japanese and Chinese developers who would love to start using Stripe...

winter_blue2• 14 years ago

There are 43 countries[1] with more English speakers than New Zealand. What led you to work on NZ first, rather than say, India or Philippines?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

EDIT: Many of these countries aren't as "online" as the ones with Her Majesty on their money. But, I should add India scores better on the "number of Internet users" scale than the UK, NZ or Canada.

India should theoretically be the next stop for any startup wishing to expand into other English-speaking markets.

speg• 14 years ago

How can you say it's "looking more and more like it's never going to be able to be used by the majority of the world... (ie any developers living outside of the USA)." when they just finished their first expansion.

Now that they've got a system down for expanding, they don't have to do so much work next time. Though every country will still have it's own set of rules and regulations regarding the finances, you must crawl before you can walk, yet alone run.

I have no idea how long it took Paypal to reach as many places as it has, but we have no reason to doubt Stripe will get there too.

rurounijones• 14 years ago

> Now that they've got a system down for expanding

I don't think they do since every single expansion is going to be pretty much unique due to the laws and regulations of the country they are expanding to. That is the main problem they have to face and the reason for their 'slow' expansion.

I am sure they can streamline a few small things but I doubt they will be able to speed up things that much.

detst• 14 years ago

They're in a business and industry that is difficult enough to launch in a single country, have repeatedly stated their intention to expand, backed up their talk by launching in Canada and yet you say, "no real plans to launch in NZ (or any other country afaik)", "completely avoid talking about future expansion" and "looking more and more like it's never going to be able to used by the majority of the world"?

There are reasons the options are poor; consider those and be patient. The fact that they're even thinking about expanding at this point is impressive enough, considering the hurdles.

jeduan• 14 years ago

With a growing startup ecosystem (500 startups being officially here, for example) and very few payment solutions (for example, Paypal only offering Payments Standard), I thought I'd just drop in to inquire about Mexico on the short list for expansion.

brackin2• 14 years ago

Love the new button, GoCardless is a good alternative for UK (and soon Europe) focused businesses until Stripe launches, know they are different as GC uses Direct Debit.

Kudos3• 14 years ago

I wouldn't call it slightly different, GoCardless is not much good to people looking to lots of small payments.

brackin2• 14 years ago

It's definitely for a certain type of seller. Although you could technically use it for micro-payments, it's not very effective at all. There's Braintree among other competitors too.

juddlyon• 14 years ago

These guys ship like crazy.

I've used the service for a client and am in the process on two others. Highly recommended, especially if you've ever been in PayPal integration hell.

arcatek• 14 years ago

Yeah ... but this button is making fishing super-easy. I'm really not sure it's a good idea (the iframe is a clever trick, but the interface could very easily be copy/paste in a fishing website. Users would have no way to check if their credit card is stolen by the website).

aptwebapps• 14 years ago

The usual way that Stripe works is that you enter your cc info on the merchant's site and it gets sent to Stripe via Javascript. The only difference here is that they're packaging it up nicely.

Void_• 14 years ago

Credit card payments is not a place to show off your ability to make pretty animations, IMO.

bluthru• 14 years ago

What are you talking about? The animations are extremely tasteful and restrained. Don't be a curmudgeon.

ljoshua• 14 years ago

Wow, the open/close animation is smoooooth! Almost as impressive as the functionality itself. Going to have to inspect the CSS for that goodness.

jaredcwhite• 14 years ago

Boom! The button idea is brilliant. It really seems like Stripe has the potential here to become the payment fabric of the web in a way PayPal once could have been but botched due to a lousy UX.

Raphael• 14 years ago

Great. But I would like the ability to customize the look of the button if it doesn't go with my design.

pkamb2• 14 years ago

It would be cool, if you start typing numbers* into the first field, it automatically switched focus to the proper second field and put the CC numbers there. Just made the mistake myself, started typing the example CC number and only afterward noticed I filled out the "Full Name" field.

*May cause problems for 2Pac and other new age names...

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

2pac would be fine, no common cards use a 2xxx prefix anymore (only [3 4 5 6] are in use these days). 50 Cent might cause issues, but those could be dampened by not bouncing to the CC field until you've entered 4 characters or so.

pkamb2• 14 years ago

I think the best design would be to bounce down upon the first number (99.999% of cases) but then allow for the entering of numbers if the user manually clicks back up and enters a number as their name (0.001%).

swanify• 14 years ago

Please bring this to the UK before i kill myself!

aquark• 14 years ago

Nice implementation. Though I wish they would address the issue with CCV validation. If you use the test card 4000000000000101 which will fail the CCV check, you still get back a valid token.

There doesn't appear to be any way to configure their API to reject a token request with an invalid CCV short of creating a customer record for each request.

matthodan• 14 years ago

Definitely need to add a close button at the top right of that window. Otherwise, nice work! :p

JacksonGariety• 14 years ago

For some reason I couldn't find the cancel button, honestly had to look for it for a while. My brain expected to be able to click in the top left or right or on the background to dismiss it, never though to look next to the "pay" button. But otherwise the design is awesome!

Frozenlock• 14 years ago

Indeed, I searched quite a while (ok, 2-3s) for a way to get out.

ANTSANTS• 14 years ago

Yeah, I'd say a big red cancel button (or maybe give the "Pay" button the whole bottom slice, and have a traditional red X button in the corner), and the ability to dismiss the dialog by clicking outside of its frame would go a long way here.

joelrunyon• 14 years ago

Stripe has been 5x better than Paypal for me (approximately). Process is seamless. Still waiting on more people to get integrations baked in, but this is good stuff.

marcamillion• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, does this button produce a receipt of the transaction? Or do I, as the developer and site owner, have to create that manually?

I would love a complete solution that just allows me to connect this button to a product, and then Stripe takes care of everything else.

lemieux• 14 years ago

I don't think that is what Stripe is meant to do. That button doesn't even charge your customer. It provides only a token that you can use server-side to charge the customer.

consultutah2• 14 years ago

I'm using the new stripe button on http://jungleblaze.com and love it.

coolnow• 14 years ago

Hi, nice site you have there.

I found a few tiny mistakes under "About Us", specifically: "The /book book/ didn't make him rich, but it did sell enough /copied/..."

Just trying to help :)

consultutah2• 14 years ago

Thank you!

xm1994• 14 years ago

I love the Stripe service and use it anytime I have the need for accepting CC payments. However, as a consumer, I see myself choosing the Paypal option for the sole reason that I only have to type in a password vs. taking out my credit card. Its the same reason I love buying items from Amazon. Any alternative to Paypal has to make the buying process just as easy.

SkyMarshal2• 14 years ago

>Its the same reason I love buying items from Amazon.

Truth. I wonder if Amazon has looked into entering this market.

fooandbarify• 14 years ago

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business/cba

SkyMarshal2• 14 years ago

In case any Stripe folks read this, I tested it with an invalid month (13) and valid year (16,15,13,12 in that order) and valid everything else, and every time it put the red error highlight around the year instead of the month.

No comment box on post page, so posting here instead.

boucher6• 14 years ago

Thanks, we're fixing this.

Ecio78• 14 years ago

The Year field is specified as YY but it allows you to write up to 4 digits, even though the characters shown are only 3 (the field is not large enough). Tested on Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7.

nb I tried 2015 as year and it was accepted, so I suppose it's ok to specify years in 4digit format

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Additional: the home/end keys don't seem to work in the text entry fields. I'm using Firefox 15 on Linux.

quadrant6• 14 years ago

Waiting for the the day us New Zealanders can use this instead of PayPal.

pc2• 14 years ago

Patrick from Stripe here.

I wanted to say thanks for the comments. This is just a beta product that we're experimenting with. As many people here are pointing out, there's still a lot we want to fix and improve (e.g. the button text and how validation works). We definitely welcome any feedback, though -- especially if you go to implement it on your site.

zsherman• 14 years ago

This is awesome guys, great work. One quick nitpicky thing that I don't think has been addressed yet: In Safari after the cancel button has been clicked, clicking the button fades in, then out, and in again before you can enter anything. Edit I'm using Safari 5.1, doesn't seem to happen in 6.

gawker5• 14 years ago

Hi Patrick,

Great work but I do have questions about the security implications. I'd love to have a chat if you have some time. I'm trying to do something similar (button popups and involves money) but we're non-competing.

sherwin• 14 years ago

I'm not sure having a modal is the best idea -- aren't modals generally frowned upon because they require a mental recontextualization and disrupt the user's flow? I'm just curious if anyone else had this thought.

Although I can see why having a prepackaged one-button solution would make sense, where Stripe takes care of the presentation / styling / inputs, so there actually is a change of context.

For the record, I use Stripe at my company, and I love it!

camwest• 14 years ago

Well the 'purchase' is usually the conversion point of a particular workflow so I don't think that this is really that much of a disruption.

moe• 14 years ago

They must be kidding. They're not seriously going to ask for CC credentials in a javascript popup without any means to inspect an SSL certificate?

karolist• 14 years ago

This is what it looks like on linux, Chromium Version 22.0.1229.92 (159988)

http://imgur.com/Fqm52

tzaman2• 14 years ago

The button itself could use a bit more personality, it currently looks like the generic bootstrap button

thomasfl• 14 years ago

The blue color is reminiscent of twitter bootstrap, but the pay dialog with the subtle embossing and slightly rounded corners must have been made with lots of love and care.

tzaman2• 14 years ago

The dialog is very nice, agreed - but the button itself is missing the 'brand touch', despite the fact it may have been designed with lots of love :)

melicerte• 14 years ago

Stripe looks great and affordable! Alas, still not available in Europe (request was sent to them more than a year from now). In the meantime, we are working with Avangate.

tonyblundell• 14 years ago

Please open to Europe!

antihero2• 14 years ago

Why would we use a payment processor that only works in the US and Canada? I mean everything I've seen about Stripe looks utterly fantastic, but we've been waiting ages for it to come to Britain and Europe, when is this actually going to happen? What actual roadblocks are in the way of this happening? What have the team responsible for this been doing for the past year or so, sitting on their arses?

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Especially since the Samwers managed to clone the whole thing for Germany. I might actually go with them.

tomschlick• 14 years ago

Every time someone posts about stripe there is this comment. They have said numerous times that they are working on it and they have to pass through several regulatory hurdles to do so. They also explained in their blog post about the canadian support that many of the hurdles of adding a secondary region to the platform wont have to be done for further regions. So your answer is it will be released when its ready.

antihero2• 14 years ago

I think it's important that they realised just quite how large the demand is for this to happen.

zerostar07• 14 years ago

How about it goes even further, i.e. use the webcam to take a snap of the credit card to fill in all card information?

ExpiredLink• 14 years ago

They really disabled Ctrl-c?

doctororange• 14 years ago

Hi Patrick. Great stuff!

We're currently implementing invoice payments with the new Stripe button over at Paydirt (https://paydirtapp.com).

One little issue: in Chromium 20.0.1132.47, the button renders with a line break and overflows the iframe like this: http://imgur.com/88st1

The same page renders the button fine in Firefox and other Chrome browsers I checked. Adding `white-space: nowrap;` via the Chrome inspector fixes the problem.

I'm tristan[ at ]paydirtapp.com if you need it replicated.

Cheers.

Stripe Button (beta)

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