Facebook Is Partnering With Stripe to Power “Buy” Button
recode.netPerfect timing? I just wrote a post on why Stripe is becoming the transaction layer of the internet.
http://blog.thinkful.com/post/98406708378/why-stripe-is-beco...
Some highlights:
- Agility in adopting new technologies
Whether it’s Bitcoin, Stellar, or 139 other currencies, Stripe is able to rapidly roll out developer kits and support for new forms of payment and protocols. To give context around this speed, the company announced support for Stellar, a decentralized protocol for sending and receiving money in any pair of currencies, just hours after its announcement. While this was obviously behind a curtain, it speaks volumes about Stripe being regarded as the first choice for these types of adoptions.
- Landing key deals
Within the span of 4 months, Stripe announced partnerships with Alipay, Twitter, Apple, and most recently Facebook. For a company of 160 employees, and just under five years in age, these are huge wins to add to their gallery.
- Developer support and evangelism
The company extensively blogs, holds office hours and maintains an active IRC channel to help companies integrate with their services. For a startup looking to gain market share, this is crucial. However, the real challenge lies in their ability to sustain this level of support as the company grows. Another area still largely untapped by Stripe is hackathons. By having mentors on-site and getting their client libraries in the hands of as many budding developers as possible, they can solidify their name as the go-to tool for online payments.
I was at a Stripe Hackathon as far back as 2012, and afaik they let many OSS projects use their office space for meetups. Unless they've slowed down on the hackathon front (in which case I imagine for good reasons), I don't think hackathons are an unexplored area for them.
Out of curiosity, what do they cover in their office hours? Basically any questions developers may have with their API and platform?
If anyone from Stripe is watching the thread: any chance of this supporting subscriptions?
Good question; lemme check...
Looks like the answer is "not currently". Sorry :(.
Pity. :(
"If [founder and CEO of multi-billion dollar startup] from Stripe is watching the thread . . ."
Stripe is so popular with developers because they are laser-focused on providing an excellent experience for the developers. This includes personally responding to every single HN post about Stripe I've ever seen.
It truly is mind-boggling there aren't more companies doing that. Having even one employee dedicated to answering questions for an hour when a thread pops up in a remotely popular place is so beneficial:
- It is directly helpful to users and casts a good light on your company
- It makes the company look more human and composed of actual people, rather than automatons (think Google)
- It provides a way to clear up potential PR disasters, misunderstandings etc when the eventual user comes up with whatever conspiracy theory is en vogue that day (there's always one)
The reason more companies don't do that is liability. Saying the wrong thing is 10x worse than saying nothing at all.
You would definitely have to make sure that the person a) has a clue and b) is, in fact authorized to make binding commitments.
Sending out a "politician" type who specializes in speaking at length while saying nothing is worse than not doing anything, IMO.
(edited to add that I think Stripe handles this extremely well... they could be a model for others)
There are spokepersons and PR people...
"personally responding to every single HN post about Stripe I've ever seen."
They haven't responded to any of my questions posted here. My email question was left unanswered as well.
I guess if you are building a service catered to customers from a very small asian country and currency which they say they support/accept, you are SOL.
I love Stripe's design and ease of API implementation but when they don't answer a simple question about a foreign exchange fee, I have no choice but to go with a local company who replies and even calls you to help you with setup and answering questions.
Stripe is really killing it this year with getting Apple and now Facebook on board with their service
Have you tried using the PayPal API? It's no wonder, Stripe is heaven in comparison.
And PayPal's API is heaven compared to what the banks provide. Here in Canada, Moneris, PSIGate, Beanstream, etc., are so freaking terrible and developer-unfriendly - and customer unfriendly! - it's incredible.
I'm selling a fairly small e-comm web project to a new company that will be doing "adventure tours" right now. They'd been told by their bank to use Moneris (probably Canada's biggest POS company), but of course, they were experiencing all sorts of hurdles getting approved because they were told "travel companies are risky", etc. They couldn't process any payments before their website went live, because Moneris insists on inspecting everything. Etc.
I told them to use Stripe. Like really strongly advised it. And they kept coming back with stuff like, "Okay, so, would you advise that we apply with Stripe now so that they can approve us due to the apparently more risky nature of our business?" And so on. My responses were always, "I don't think that's going to even be a thing you have to think about."
And it hasn't been.
Another Moneris story: I had a customer all set up with integrated payment processing through their gateway. Then we were informed that they needed to a security scan on the server. They outsource this to some other company.
So they run this scan, and it fails - and why? Because the server is equipped with all kinds of countermeasures (firewall stuff, port scan blocking, whatever - that's not my area of expertise). So they tell us that in order for their scan to pass, we need to disable all of the security measures that are currently protecting the server.
You really can't make this shit up. After that experience I swore I would always, always try to talk my customers out of using the banks and to use Stripe instead. And it's working.
I can verify that "POS" does not stand for what Moneris hopes it stands for.
Ha, what could they possibly be scanning for, malware? The sad thing is that I'm sure companies are doing that.So they tell us that in order for their scan to pass, we need to disable all of the security measures that are currently protecting the server.It's probably a PCI compliance scan. They check for a lot of things like (basic) XSS, CSRF, insecure versions of PHP/Apache, unprotected folders named "admin/", backup files which could leak source code, and so on. It's mostly just for show, but can catch some stupid mistakes. Typically you'll have to whitelist their servers so that they don't trip your firewall/IDS/whatever.
> backup files which could leak source code
Would an open source app not be PCI compliant?
Nah, that would be fine. It's not a problem with the source being available, more the fact that the file could contain sensitive information like passwords (like say in a config.php file).
It is quite terrible to use. Stripe is super simple to set up and now testing Bitcoin support.
Am I the only one who's interested in seeing how this plays out because I'm sceptic about people buying not even 0.1% of the time they "like" something?
I'm pretty interested in seeing how this will end up too.
People are not going to buy what they "like". They are going to buy what they truly like in real life. Something they think is very cool, perhaps haven't seen it anywhere else.
It would be exactly the same thing like with fb ads and fb pages. Some people just complain and complain about everything, other are just quietly crushing it.
I'd love to have a list of people or companies who are crushing it with FB content marketing (not FB ads, which is different). Could you please help me with that?
Because the people who were crushing it with Twitter, you know, it turned out to be just bullshit (the revolution in Iran, Dell, Zappos, for example). Thanks.
Fuck it. I'll play along.
Buzzfeed and the other a hundred or so copycats. Searchengineland.com, sejorunal.com, smashingmagazine, ColledgeHumor, NatGeo, Scientific american, goodhousekeeping.com to name just a very FEW. I've written for some of those and have seen the actual traffic numbers. There are thousands of pages which promote something and do very well. Those are the ones I saw in 2 minutes browsing my feed.
I can go in a lot more detail, but this is just not the place. The reality is that marketing and PR is fucking hard. It's like me saying "I tried to build a spaceship, but Boeing's parts just suck big time, so I couldn't".
I just don't get why people think they can just wake up one day and be rockstar PR specialists. Just because you can click a few buttons on a web page doesn't mean people want to read your shit.
I'm talking about companies selling products (or services), not about companies giving out content for free.
Facebook is a feed-reader (and many other things rolled into one). Not a good place to sell, that's my point.
Some of those sell products and services. Some do lead generation for b2b services and products. Selling on facebook is a terrible idea. Creating content and using facebook as distribution channel is a great idea. If you can execute it of course.
Would you like me to serve you dinner too?
Sincere questions: So what was FB doing with Paypal before? And hasn't FB already had a buy button which wasn't popular?
I wonder what this means for Soldsie, the service that allows users to buy within the comments section. Seems like the best UX should ultimately win and that puts Facebook at a big advantage.
Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue themselves (like birthday gifting), then bad luck. You get the advantage of their distribution at the cost of platform risk.