MasterCard's Simplify Commerce

[greghinch]

To play diplomat, I see a lot of Stripe loyalty / Mastercard hate already brewing here, and I think that's a bit unwarranted. Stripe has certainly earned their place as a cherished service, but I would venture to bet a lot of devs worked quite hard on Simplify as well, so it'd be nice to see discussion on the merits of the offering rather than preconceived notions of the provider.

If nothing else, even if 0.05% isn't much, I'm happy to see if they can start a bit of a pricing war here. If it drives payment costs down across the board, all the better.

[pc]

(I built the first version of Stripe and work here.)

I think the unfortunate aspect of these clones is that they're lazy. I have huge respect for anyone that innovates in payments -- I know how hard it is, and I'd imagine it's even harder to do that as part of a larger company.

What I find disappointing is when a product copies everything about Stripe -- everything from Stripe.js to the "live/test" switch to the "1/2/3" getting started pop-up when you create your account to the nomenclature of "InvoiceItems" to the ordering of tabs in the account settings.

It's certainly MasterCard's (and anyone's) prerogative to do that, but I don't think it's particularly worthy of support from other engineers and makers.

We should encourage each other any time we see great, original work -- creativity is hard, and new ideas are often delicate in the early days. It'd be really cool if MasterCard did that, but Simplify unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything that's new. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

[foobarqux]

Entering into a price war would kill Stripe: it does not have sustainable low cost advantage.

[appleflaxen]

I don't hate Mastercard nearly as much as I love competition.

The existing credit card companies have an oligopoly on payment, and the more people there are in this space, the better options we will have.

[rudros]

Check out https://www.simplify.com// (the double slash ending is important).

[joshrice]

What was there? Just getting a 404...or is that your point?

[mattparcher]

Something that caught my eye: the name "Simplify" is pretty close to "Simple", the online bank service.

Different products entirely, I realize—but heck, Simple’s twitter handle is even @simplify.

[justinreeves]

That was actually what drew me to the headline. I saw "Simplify" and thought it was about my bank.

[eightyone]

I made the same connection.

[kawera]

At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business

Oh well...

[sideproject]

With clones of Stripe poppin' up everywhere, I think the niche advantage would be to be able to scale the service to a number of other countries where this type of service is either expensive or unavailable (please come to Australia! - I know there is "pin", but we wouldn't mind a cheaper alternative without any monthly fees!)

[AndyJPartridge]

I was going to post the same thing.

Hope Stripe get there first, as I'd like to support them over Mastercard.

[pvnick]

I wouldn't trust anything that comes from Mastercard or Visa directly. I would much rather have the companies' idiosyncrasies and politics abstracted through a 3rd-party service like stripe or balanced. That's just my kneejerk reaction, take it or leave it.

[CoachRufus87]

Why not? Millions trust them with one their most important assets: cash.

[zt]

I find this to be a really interesting business decision for MasterCard. MasterCard cannot offer this service directly on their information systems because of there own rules and the antitrust consent decree.

So what have they done? They've built a wrapper around Priority Payments Services, an independent sales organization of Wells Fargo. (For reference, Stripe is also an ISO of Wells Fargo Merchant Services).

Which is all a long way of saying that MasterCard went pretty far out of there way to build this system. They must really see value in selling directly to merchant developers.

There is another possible story here: maybe the ISO wanted to compete with Stripe, they built the system and site, and asked MasterCard for their branding.

[foobarqux]

Mastercard can see almost exactly how much Stripe is growing, I don't think they needed to be very perceptive in "seeing value in selling directly to merchant developers".

[diggan]

As usual, there is no information at all on which countries that is supported, I guess this is only supported in USA. Maybe I'm the only one outside of America...

Edit: Yeah, after registering, confirming my email and trying to apply for a full account, I know that it's only for America. Sigh...

[sleepyhead]

"At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business."

https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-s...

[jrgnsd]

I had to read through the Developer Terms of Use to find that out.

[jackbravo]

If MasterCard can create an international version of this product before Stripe, then this will be big.

[tlrobinson]

BTW MasterCard has a whole bunch of other interesting APIs available: https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API

[sachinag]

Complete competitor to Stripe and Balanced and Braintree.js. Just a teeny bit underneath pricing for all - 2.85% versus 2.90%.

[rsync]

... which is a fairly terrible percentage rate. Even a small processor should be able to get under 2%, provided you don't have a lot of fraud/chargebacks.

There's a tremendous amount of froth in those rates.

[irollboozers]

You'd think someone like Mastercard could actually provide a significant enough percentage difference to matter. 2.85% is still way too high.

[zanny]

Give me your bitcoin address and we can have a transfer in minutes for a few satoshis or within an hour or so for free.

(blahblahblah, usd, ponzie scheme, cbx halting transfers, grandmothers)

[joelrunyon]

Jumping on this thread for a flyer.

Any stripe devs know if it's possible to integrate with infusionsoft.com? That integration would make me so, so happy.

[jkuria]

I completely agree. And with 1ShoppingCart too. I considered using stripe but they didn't integrate with any of the popular shopping carts that handle affiliate marketing type of features. So I have to pay for two merchant accounts and a load balancing gateway. I also live in fear of my funds being frozen any moment or losing sales if I go over my processing limit.

[levosmetalo]

US[A ONLY | ELESS].

[jusben1369]

0.05% is a tiny amount. This is the first shot though across the bow on lowering the transactional rates set by Stripe, Braintree etc.

[gesman]

It is only supported in USA. I'm in Canada. Next please ...

[aquark]

I'd like to see one of these 'API friendly' companies compete more in the physical space to.

Basically something equivalent to Square with a Stripe-like API and lower rates for swiped transactions.

[kylelibra]

The entrenched payment companies are definitely scared of competition, but by launching clones of their competitors they show they still don't get it.

[agilebyte]

I think that their target audience are (mom & pop) businesses (about to go online) happy to trust the Mastercard brand, not programmers that get uppity about seeing yet another clone & complaining about an API.

[jwilliams]

Restricted to US individuals and companies only... I'm not sure why sites don't call that out from the get-go.

[sangaya]

It is not restricted to US individuals, just US Businesses. "Using Simplify Commerce, you can create payments with credit and debit cards carrying major card brand logos for customers anywhere in the world. At this time, however, the merchant must be a U.S. business." [https://simplify.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/1173591-s...]

[jusben1369]

"Sign up and develop. When you're ready to go live, tell us a little about your business."

It's actually more of a "PayMill" model than a Stripe model. So they allow you to begin development but they don't actually promise immediate on-boarding.

[ceejayoz]

Stripe does exactly the same thing. You have to enter some business details like tax ID, sales volume, etc. to go live.

[rdl]

Given that they permit weapons and pornography, if they're otherwise just a direct clone of Stripe with the MasterCard brand, they're pretty awesome. I'd be fine if it cost 3.5%, but it's actually cheaper too.