Why switching from Stripe to Balanced has helped LaunchTrack scale

[pvnick]

I am currently using Balanced to help a client develop a marketplace application - both to collect payments as well as to distribute payouts - and working with the service has really been a delight. The documentation is well-developed, includes clean sample code for everything I've needed (to the point of just being able to drop it in), and support is really responsive and helpful. Just today I had a question about implementing bank account verification, hopped on the IRC chat room, and within all of 30 seconds had my question answered. Great job to the Balanced team!

[eclipxe]

I'll second this. Balanced has been pretty awesome to work with. I looked at switching away at one point, but everything "just works" and no other solution had all of the requirements met for running a legit marketplace.

[mrcwinn]

Apple, meet Orange.

Why are they bashing Stripe Connect, which is not comparable to Balanced? They were looking for Stripe Marketplace, which does offer a complete white-label solution.

For a fairer comparison and review of Stripe's white label marketplace API, I will shamelessly plug my blog:

http://blog.chriswinn.com/working-with-stripe-payouts

The people at Balanced are great, but I still prefer Stripe's products any day of the week. They've written the best API and documentation I've seen in a while, and laid a lot of groundwork for others to mimic. A good thing for us developers, at least.

[dclausen]

Stripe Connect, according to their own website (https://stripe.com/connect) is Stripe's marketplace offering.

Stripe Connect is not a complete white label solution. The user still has to be redirected to stripe.com to complete the OAuth process. We had many issues with users being confused as to who Stripe was, and why were they asking for their personal information when creating an account.

[jonathancordeau]

I think you've missed the point Chris. I wasn't bashing Stripe at all; quite the contrary actually. I have a ton of respect for their founders & team. However, there are some elements which are essential to our platform and payments model, which Stripe/Connect/Marketplace cannot provide; Descriptor & Money Management, among s few other nuance things. With so many options out there today, (many VERY BAD options), I merely wanted to share our process and headaches, in the hopes of saving another entrepreneur a bunch of time.

[dylandrop]

IMO, neither really are as great as they should be yet. That being said, I'm using Stripe. Switching over from Paypal, this is what I have to say:

-The process to make charges from a sellers account seems to need an unnecessary amount of requests

-Why can't we pay out to multiple sellers at once like Paypal can?

-At least in Stripe, it seems kind of silly I have to refresh a credit card token each time I want to make a new charge

[cristinacordova]

(I work at Stripe)

If you're looking to split payments to multiple parties, you may want to take a look at sending transfers, rather than using Connect: https://stripe.com/blog/send-payouts-with-stripe

This only requires the sellers' bank account information in order to pay them out.

Stripe provides a Customer abstraction that makes it easy to save credit card information for later and use it multiple times. Instead of charging the card immediately, you can create a new Customer object and save the card to that customer. See more here: https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges#saving-credit-card...

[heynk]

You can save credit card information and use it multiple times:

https://support.stripe.com/questions/can-i-save-a-card-and-c...

[jonathancordeau]

If I were you, I'd go directly to the source: @cjc (stripe) and @jkwade (balanced) It seems like you would be served well by both companies, so you should definitely share your specifics and see which one is the best fit.