collision

John from Stripe here. Very sorry about this -- looking into it now.

[Stripe co-founder]

As multiple commenters note, UK and EU interchange is significantly lower than that in the US. So the rewards market tends to be different as a result.

That said, launching this in the UK would still be attractive to us. We don't think rewards are the primary thing businesses are looking for.

As we talked to founders, it seems like they all want a corporate card early on for their business spending (to get it off personal cards). As the business adds employees, they need a sensible way to keep tabs on spending without the expensing process being really painful. I think that's just as relevant in the UK, with the added detail of multi-currency spending being more relevant.

Which country are you in? We're working on speeding up payout times around the world -- it's something people are (rightly) very sensitive to. If you email me at john@stripe.com I can look into it for you.

First, let me explain why drop-shipping is a popular vector for fraud. Drop-shipping means selling a product which you don't make or hold in stock; instead, when a purchase comes in you go and buy it somewhere else and have it shipped directly to the buyer. You can think of it as a form of arbitrage. They're remarkably efficient businesses: they need to have no assets or physical presence. The flip side of that is that if you were looking to create a legitimate-looking shell business to, say, cash in on stolen credit cards then drop-shipping would be a very plausible cover story. It's hard for us to disprove.

Since Stripe is on the hook if customers don't get their goods or services, we need to be able to ensure that the businesses are legitimate. It's hard for us to reliably do so with drop-shippers. While dropshipping is not Shopify's primary business, they are more specialized in ecommerce, they have more business-specific data, and there are a handful of other properties which let them support these businesses more readily.

"We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses built on Stripe."

This really is true. All companies will have to apply some criteria -- there are businesses that AWS or mail companies reject. In our case, we would like to avoid editorial and moral stances as much as we can. And as the post hopefully makes clear, we still have a ways to go.

If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would blame you for that.

We would actually like to be a bit more progressive than that -- rather than supinely CYAing all the time, we want to (and frequently do) take risks and push back on behalf of businesses we believe in. The latter half of the post was intended to lay out some examples of that. But the distinction you're drawing makes sense and I'll look at editing the post with it in mind. Thanks for the feedback.

Separately, I would be very interested to hear about your suboptimal experiences if you'd be willing to share them over email or the phone.

For sure. While I'm interested in fixing the specific case, I'm more interested in discovering the underlying systematic error and fixing the support experience in the cases I don't see.

And thanks for the nice words about IRC! The folks in #stripe on freenode are always happy to chat.

That's an abnormally high rate of declines to be seeing. Can you send me an email (john@stripe.com) and I'll look into it?

One change we're making is giving you better insight to which charges Stripe declines on your behalf (because they look fraudulent; you can override this behavior) and which charges are declined by the cardholder bank (you can't override this).

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm guessing it's now too late, but if not I'd be happy to take a look at your case and escalate it. My email is john@stripe.com.

We're trying to outline how the restrictions and limitations that exist can affect different businesses. With the right approvals (and often with substantially increased fees), some of these businesses can certainly operate. And we hope to be able to work with as many as possible in the future.

By our nature, we are on the side of people building things. We have been through many of these kinds of struggles ourselves. (Stripe's first application for a corporate bank account was rejected!) So we wanted to make that clear and describe where we're falling short of our aspirations today.

Anything with low traceability and high resale value (like dropshipped goods) tends to become a fraud/money-laundering target.

Whew. Almost blew the cover of your seasteading community there for a moment.

This is complementary functionality: you can choose whether you want to incorporate locally or using Atlas. We'll stay supporting CA-USD and will be expanding local-country support. We recently launched private beta support for businesses in new countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Singapore, in fact: https://stripe.com/global

We're getting rid of the $0.25 transfer fee and replacing it with 0.5% of funds paid out to managed accounts. We do more work (and incur more cost) if you're using managed accounts, so we think it makes sense.

Yeah, the $0.25 transfer fee is going away. We didn't want to penalize platforms for transferring earnings to their sellers more frequently.

What's your use case? You can't use cards stored in Stripe on non-Stripe sites, if that's what you're asking.

Yes, they're the one product now. We didn't want divergent products for similar use cases. One feature we think is neat is you can mix-and-match standalone accounts (where the seller uses a regular Stripe account) and managed accounts (where the seller never goes to Stripe).

In our defense, they keep adding new EU countries. But no, we're not in all of them yet. We're in 13 EU countries, Norway, and Switzerland: https://stripe.com/global

You have two options: you can have sellers link a Stripe account (and we'll do all the downstream work, like collecting their bank account info and verifying their identity). Or you can create a managed account via API, where the seller does everything from within your app and never needs to go to Stripe.

Hm? As a business selling with Stripe, you won't be taking any FX risk. You request $20, and you receive $20 - 0.5%.

I am a huge fan of Matt Levine's work, but the articles you reference are about banks who participate in the FX markets, which is... different.

(Relevant disclosure: I work at Stripe.)

We're not marking up the exchange rate. 0.5% is the only fee.

The "Open Wallet" link has a bitcoin URI. If you have a wallet installed, it'll pop open that wallet. More here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0021.mediawi...

Stripe doesn't have a Bitcoin wallet for consumers.

That's right. We only fire the webhook in case you want to, say, update the expiry or last four digits you're rendering to your user.

Pricing neutrality is hard to enforce and can lead to price inflation (c.f. interchange), but we'd be game for something along these lines. Part of Stripe's raison d'être is making pretty advanced payment infrastructure — only available prior to those with considerable means and past experience — available to anyone. We're obviously not there yet (witness the limited number of countries, payouts only being available in the US for now) but that's where we're trying to get to.

We're not opposed to supporting other cryptocurrencies in future. We're cryptocurrency nerds, not Bitcoin nerds specifically.

For a BRL charge the transaction will still be to a US merchant, rather than a local merchant. You're right that in some countries like Brazil, this can be a bit hit-or-miss.

Both have been up and running in Australia longer than us, actually. And we want to launch multicurrency support in Australia properly: as a default part of every Stripe account with no paperwork. We could probably get a half-baked version out the door faster, but I don't think that's fair to our Australian users either.

In our experience, the conversion rates most customers get aren't very good, and this will end up cheaper. More importantly, the price can be a sane amount (€14.99/month for a $19.99/month SaaS product) and will be predictable in advance. But you're right; there will sometimes be people who would be better off paying in dollars.

We don't collect interest on customer funds and -- if you run the numbers -- it wouldn't be of any significant value if we did.

It's coming! Happy to give you beta access -- john@stripe.com.

Stripe collects information from you before you can start using it -- you'll see us ask for this when you go to activate your account. But we've worked to make it as quick, painless and sensible as possible.

The sign-up process is part of the product, and we treat it that way. Onerous paperwork is not an inevitability.