If you simply want multiple account support to easily switch between them inside the browser then adding it to any website is easy -- Chrome User Profiles (Settings-Users-Add new User).
Super easy to set up and switch between the instances. You can even set an icon for the user that is always shown at the top right corner. Saves lifetimes if you have multiple twitter, FB etc accounts to manage and don't need a special marketing SaaS.
While I really appreciate this feature, I'd love it even more if I could get multi-account reporting (from Stripe or anybody using the API). I have 3 Stripe accounts and don't have a problem with password management, due to having LastPass, but answering simple questions like "How much money should I expect to receive in transfers in the next week?" requires me to do three context switches and then math. (Also, mentioned this to support years ago, but even on a single account there's no "sum of scheduled transfers" on the transfer page, which has always struck me like a number likely to be of interest to many people.)
This is a priority for me which is annoying enough to mention and to have bought various Stripe reporting apps speculatively, hoping one would implement it, but below the cusp of "Screw it, I'll figure out how to use the reporting API then do summary stats on a cron job and dump them onto one of my dashboards."
I recently released my first self-published browser game (http://scarletsword.com) and used Stripe for the microtransactions. It's wonderful, and easy, and updates like this one make me excited for its future development. You know, as if it's not good enough already.
Wait. Stripe has micro transaction support? I can't find it on their pricing page where is it? How does it compare to Paypal's micropayments pricing (5% + 5¢ instead of the standard 2.9% + 30¢).
This is great, I have been considering switching to Stripe and this has almost sealed the deal.
One question if a Stripe employee happens to come in here: The horror stories I have read make me nervous about switching. I have read about massive delays in getting paid with only vague explanations, and in more than one case Stripe actually reversing all charges made by a merchant after allowing a new account to exist for several days. Merchants performed services/shipped products based upon Stripe charges, then Stripe reversed the charges with essentially no explanation. These reversals were supposedly not at the request of cardholders.
What percentage of accounts suffer these types of issues?
I'd love to hear from anyone who feels poorly treated or has encountered problems like this: I'm [email protected]. (I'm one of Stripe's founders.)
The way we look at it is: legitimate businesses are always fine and -- furthermore -- we know that our reputation rests on not screwing anyone over. We can afford to lose money on an account; we cannot afford to damage our reputation. Our internal philosophy document states: "In evaluating businesses, we should first be careful never to do harm." Luckily, we've had almost no issues to date.
One unfortunate case that we do often run in to, however, is that a fraudulent user will start loudly posting purported horror stories on various forums in an effort to get us to release money. It's a decent strategy: these stories are bad for Stripe. It's obviously very hard for someone else to distinguish this case from a "real" case of Stripe acting malevolently. But, no matter what happened, we obviously can't rebut them and post sensitive details about their account. So their stories stand.
Even if we were omniscient and had neither any false positives nor any false negatives, these stories would exist. It just comes with scale. And, in reality, we're of course far from omniscient. We just try to turn the dial all the way towards false negatives -- we never want to hurt a legitimate business.
It's a tough dynamic. It exists to some extent with many online services (most of whom have terms of services that prohibit certain businesses); Stripe is more acutely subject to it since you can fairly readily use Stripe for financial gain. I'd love to hear from anyone who thinks we should handle it differently or better.
(Downandout, to address your question directly, we'd be happy to chat with you (and anyone else) directly before you make the switch to reassure you that your business doesn't contravene our ToS. Feel free to drop me a line.)
Lastly, I mean it about actively wanting to hear from anyone who thinks we've handled a situation badly -- if there are any mistakes, we need to take action. [email protected] -- I'd be happy to chat by email, phone, or IM.
I have no affiliation with Stripe aside from developing on their API. One of the explanations I've heard in regards to this is a scenario something like the following:
1. Merchant sets up Stripe account.
2. Merchant begins processing credit cards.
3. Stripe's vetting process kicks in and takes a look at Merchant, finding that Merchant is operating a business type that is prohibited by Stripe's TOS.
4. Stripe cancels all transactions and locks the account.
From what I can tell Stripe allows you to start charging immediately and only some time later does the vetting process kick in where a human takes a look at the merchant. When the merchant is operating a business that is prohibited[0], this happens.
There are about five hundred services that need to do this, to be honest. The separation between a user and an account is one that's largely not valued when people are originally modeling applications, but it probably should be. (Speaking for myself as well here.)
They can run concurrently and are completely isolated. I don't think this is possible with firefox yet. I use app mode since I don't need the normal navigation when using it this way.
Interesting, Im in Australia and I have had this feature in Stripe for a few days already from when I signed up. The only issue I have had is that I cant find where to delete accounts. Otherwise, congrats to the Stripe team!
This is great! This is one of the things we looked at when choosing a credit card provider. (We did not end up choosing Stripe, but this certainly sweetens the deal. Always looking for a better rate!)
Does this mean that we could have multiple accounts, with different soft descriptors, merged together? Would we also be able to see, in a single report, the transactions for all of the accounts (rather than having to log in separately to download sales data?)
Can't wait to see more of your de-annoying features!
As nice as new features are, I do wish you'd work on bringing all of your existing features to non-US customers first!
Your international support is definitely better than most payment processors (Balanced I'm looking at you), but it's been over six months since you introduced Transfers to US customers. I'd love to know if there is a technical/legal reason behind this? The US has a number marketplace payment solutions but I've yet to come across any European ones.
Well, it's a tough balance, and much of it can't be expedited just by applying more manpower -- beyond mythical man month considerations, there's also the fact that we're often waiting on other partners. Given that, working on new features doesn't necessarily slow our international expansion.
But I hear you. Hope to have more to report before too long.
Thanks for calling us out, robotfelix (honestly). We're working on expanding internationally, but until then checkout mangopay.com for European marketplace payments.
>I have no particular insight into Stripe's product roadmap, but my guess is that they probably won't put 5% + $0.05 pricing into the market anytime soon. That pricing would put them underwater on individual transactions, since it costs more than that to process a charge to a credit / debit card.
>Amazon and PayPal can only do it because a) PayPal can sometimes process payments to a user's bank account (instead of their credit / debit card) or pull funds from a user's existing PayPal balance, which costs them next to nothing and b) Amazon also sometimes routes payments through a bank account, but they also don't have high margins and can live with some 'loss leader' transactions.
Cool! Just the other day I was wondering if Stripe supported this, because otherwise it would've been a pain in the ass to have multiple projects on Stripe. Thanks!
[+] [-] AhtiK|12 years ago|reply
Super easy to set up and switch between the instances. You can even set an icon for the user that is always shown at the top right corner. Saves lifetimes if you have multiple twitter, FB etc accounts to manage and don't need a special marketing SaaS.
[+] [-] pixelcort|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patio11|12 years ago|reply
This is a priority for me which is annoying enough to mention and to have bought various Stripe reporting apps speculatively, hoping one would implement it, but below the cusp of "Screw it, I'll figure out how to use the reporting API then do summary stats on a cron job and dump them onto one of my dashboards."
[+] [-] DizzyDoo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|12 years ago|reply
One question if a Stripe employee happens to come in here: The horror stories I have read make me nervous about switching. I have read about massive delays in getting paid with only vague explanations, and in more than one case Stripe actually reversing all charges made by a merchant after allowing a new account to exist for several days. Merchants performed services/shipped products based upon Stripe charges, then Stripe reversed the charges with essentially no explanation. These reversals were supposedly not at the request of cardholders.
What percentage of accounts suffer these types of issues?
[+] [-] pc|12 years ago|reply
The way we look at it is: legitimate businesses are always fine and -- furthermore -- we know that our reputation rests on not screwing anyone over. We can afford to lose money on an account; we cannot afford to damage our reputation. Our internal philosophy document states: "In evaluating businesses, we should first be careful never to do harm." Luckily, we've had almost no issues to date.
One unfortunate case that we do often run in to, however, is that a fraudulent user will start loudly posting purported horror stories on various forums in an effort to get us to release money. It's a decent strategy: these stories are bad for Stripe. It's obviously very hard for someone else to distinguish this case from a "real" case of Stripe acting malevolently. But, no matter what happened, we obviously can't rebut them and post sensitive details about their account. So their stories stand.
Even if we were omniscient and had neither any false positives nor any false negatives, these stories would exist. It just comes with scale. And, in reality, we're of course far from omniscient. We just try to turn the dial all the way towards false negatives -- we never want to hurt a legitimate business.
It's a tough dynamic. It exists to some extent with many online services (most of whom have terms of services that prohibit certain businesses); Stripe is more acutely subject to it since you can fairly readily use Stripe for financial gain. I'd love to hear from anyone who thinks we should handle it differently or better.
(Downandout, to address your question directly, we'd be happy to chat with you (and anyone else) directly before you make the switch to reassure you that your business doesn't contravene our ToS. Feel free to drop me a line.)
Lastly, I mean it about actively wanting to hear from anyone who thinks we've handled a situation badly -- if there are any mistakes, we need to take action. [email protected] -- I'd be happy to chat by email, phone, or IM.
[+] [-] rbritton|12 years ago|reply
1. Merchant sets up Stripe account.
2. Merchant begins processing credit cards.
3. Stripe's vetting process kicks in and takes a look at Merchant, finding that Merchant is operating a business type that is prohibited by Stripe's TOS.
4. Stripe cancels all transactions and locks the account.
From what I can tell Stripe allows you to start charging immediately and only some time later does the vetting process kick in where a human takes a look at the merchant. When the merchant is operating a business that is prohibited[0], this happens.
[0]: https://stripe.com/prohibited_businesses
[+] [-] robbiet480|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsk139|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farmdawgnation|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jewel|12 years ago|reply
For example, I have a work-trello and a personal-trello command in ~/bin, but you can use shortcuts in Windows or whatever the equivalent is in OS X.
chromium-browser --app=https://trello.com --user-data-dir=/home/jewel/.profiles/personal-trello
They can run concurrently and are completely isolated. I don't think this is possible with firefox yet. I use app mode since I don't need the normal navigation when using it this way.
[+] [-] anthonys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mokkol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saiko-chriskun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfour|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartleybrody|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankdenbow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mflindell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lachyg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memset|12 years ago|reply
Does this mean that we could have multiple accounts, with different soft descriptors, merged together? Would we also be able to see, in a single report, the transactions for all of the accounts (rather than having to log in separately to download sales data?)
Can't wait to see more of your de-annoying features!
[+] [-] pc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jareau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotfelix|12 years ago|reply
Your international support is definitely better than most payment processors (Balanced I'm looking at you), but it's been over six months since you introduced Transfers to US customers. I'd love to know if there is a technical/legal reason behind this? The US has a number marketplace payment solutions but I've yet to come across any European ones.
[+] [-] pc|12 years ago|reply
But I hear you. Hope to have more to report before too long.
[+] [-] jareau|12 years ago|reply
Thanks for calling us out, robotfelix (honestly). We're working on expanding internationally, but until then checkout mangopay.com for European marketplace payments.
[+] [-] riteshpatel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almost|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jareau|12 years ago|reply
Excerpt:
>I have no particular insight into Stripe's product roadmap, but my guess is that they probably won't put 5% + $0.05 pricing into the market anytime soon. That pricing would put them underwater on individual transactions, since it costs more than that to process a charge to a credit / debit card.
>Amazon and PayPal can only do it because a) PayPal can sometimes process payments to a user's bank account (instead of their credit / debit card) or pull funds from a user's existing PayPal balance, which costs them next to nothing and b) Amazon also sometimes routes payments through a bank account, but they also don't have high margins and can live with some 'loss leader' transactions.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] roycehaynes|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] curiouslurker|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sokrates|12 years ago|reply