Stripe: Alipay support

[hunvreus]

On a personal level, I'm very excited to know that I won't have to try and integrate Alipay in any of our products anymore. It's nightmare to deal with, even for our Chinese team.

But for Stripe, it's a huge step forward into tapping in a massive market. Most Chinese people can't (or won't) use card to pay online; they simply have Alipay connected to their bank account or use prepaid cards. Good move Stripe.

[turingbook]

Alipay API is that bad?

[sabalaba]

This is a huge deal. I'm currently in Shenzhen and Alipay (支付宝) is a common and convenient way to make payments, on Taobao, in person, or otherwise. Alipay is an interesting product in its own right, even if examined independently of the Alibaba Group. It has a money market service, Yu'E Bao (余额宝) that is currently a top 3 global money market fund with $89B AUM. That's a taste of the scale of the market in China.

http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-201...

[dikunlun]

Same here, working in Shanghai, building a few products and we could not really find an elegant way to integrate payment in those targeted to the Chinese audience. Using Stripe for all of the payments is an awesome news!

[gatehouse]

(slide 136)

[saurik]

A question which no one has asked yet: what are the fees? Alipay charges a flat 3% while Stripe normally (for credit cards) charges 2.9%+$0.30. The variable cost to Stripe from a credit card processor is (of course) lower than 2.9% (so Stripe has a margin), 3% is (clearly) not (the fixed $0.30 only helping for small transactions). Will Stripe be charging more (variable, to have a margin) and/or less (fixed, to pass on the lack of a fixed interchange fee to customers) than its usual credit card processing fees when a customer is using Alipay? (An answer may also shine some light on whether Alipay is profit sharing with Stripe to get Stripe's support or if Stripe is being forced to charge on top of Alipay to get access to their users.)

[cristinacordova]

(I work at Stripe)

The pricing for Alipay transactions is the same for credit/debit card transactions: https://stripe.com/pricing

[jqueryin]

This is great news for those using Stripe Checkout. Are there any plans to offer Alipay to Stripe customers who are utilizing the API for subscriptions, invoicing, and recurred payments?

As an aside, we also get a load of client requests for PayPal as an alternative simply because many people don't have a US-based credit card. If you're making the moves to support global markets, it's tough to side step them.

I really wish PayPal brought back their digital credit card which you could preload with cash and use online like a real credit/debit card. It would solve all of our problems with users who don't have a CC!

[lachyg]

(I work at Stripe.)

The Alipay integration with Checkout works just like Stripe.js, in that it will return a token that you can charge instantly, or attach to a customer and utilize for subscription, invoicing and recurring payments.

[silverlight]

If you guys would do this exact same thing for PayPal, I would be so happy.

[pc]

We'd be very happy to support PayPal in the same way. If any PayPal folks are reading, I'm [e-mail] :-).

[rogerdpack]

and dwolla please, with its lower overhead? :)

[jhancock]

three questions:

1 - Will you handle micropayments (i.e. not rake 30 cents on top of 3%)? Alipay excels at this.

2 - Can some/all of the RMB sent to the Alipay account not get exchanged to USD and auto transferred to the Stripe account holder's bank account? This is a common use case to pay for China-side costs and not have RMB exchanged to USD and exchanged back to RMB to pay partners/vendors.

3 - Will you have servers inside China? If you don't you will need some incredibly fault-tolerant javascript and page load magic as some of your interactions with non-China servers will fail.

[Silhouette]

This is a very interesting development, partly for being a useful feature for some merchants in its own right, but perhaps also if it signals a more general move from Stripe toward supporting a broader range of payment methods through a unified API. That strategy seems to dovetail neatly with accepting payments in multiple currencies, which was something else Stripe developed not so long ago but isn't much use alone where the local conventional payment methods don't involve credit cards.

[PhilipA]

Now we just need to see Stripe come to the other countries, which doesn't yet have access to them (I have Denmark in mind).

[stephenson]

I have Denmark in mind too!

[akirk]

Austria1 It seems like easy deal because almost everything works the same way as in Germany, tax wise.

[sandstrom]

The same, for Sweden!

[darvy]

I wish there was a non-JS version of Stripe Checkout. Rather than throwing up the modal window, I'd prefer to redirect my users to a Stripe hosted checkout page where they can make payment and we can deal with it via webhooks. Similar to how PayPal works really.

Currently I'm integrating with the API directly to do this but I'd have preferred to use a page hosted by Stripe, especially considering they are starting to open up to other payment methods.

[afarrell]

As a buyer, I hate when pages do that. It jolts me out of the smooth experience of buying a thing. Since I've never done a PayPal integration, seeing the PayPal logo as part of that experience is a big chunk of the reason I believe it when other programmers say that PayPal is super-annoying to integrate with.

Stripe would need a page that doesn't have its branding but instead only has yours.

[mperham]

Stripe defers to partners that handle the checkout process. One example that I use personally is Plasso.

[SpacialSense]

Alipay payments will all be nominated in Yuan (RMB). How does Stripe convert this back to USD? The laws of converting currency in China are very restrictive.

[vcherubini]

Wow this is awesome. I had to integrate Alipay into a checkout process in ~2010 and it was a complete nightmare - and not even as a result of the language barrier. The API was just so so bad. Glad this is in Stripe now.

[leetrout]

Just did an integration in December- it looks like it has changed for the better but the documentation is still in poor shape.

This is going to make things so much easier. I'm excited to try this since we had to pay $1000USD to open an Alipay account.

[alphadevx]

Kudos to Stripe for adding this. Having working on an Alipay integration via another provider, I know there is business demand for this.

[jpalley]

How does Stripe deal with the currency conversion? Is this tracked by Alipay on an individual level (i.e. so consumers can't spend more then the legal conversion amount of 50k USD)?

[rahimnathwani]

How is that annual 50k USD monitored/enforced now? If I have multiple bank accounts, will I be prevented from withdrawing a combined 50k from overseas ATMs?

[joedrew]

As a Canadian, I'm most interested in when Stripe will start supporting our Interac debit cards. At that point, from my point of view, it'll have taken over the world. :)

[avibryant]

(I'm Canadian and work at Stripe)

How often do you actually buy things online with interac? I think I've maybe done it once, and the redirect-to-the-bank flow is pretty awkward. My sense is that this isn't ever a barrier to conversion for Canadians (except maybe for very large purchases?), but I'd be curious to hear otherwise.

[alanctgardner3]

It'd be nice, but you could fit 40 Canadas into China (population-wise), and most of us already have credit cards due to our proximity with the US. It's sad but completely rational that so many American services don't bother with us as a country.

[karsonenns]

If we don't use stripe checkout, would there still be a way to integrate this using the APIs?

[pc]

Not for now. Part of the reason Alipay was comfortable with this new flow is because it's served as part of Checkout. If we were to provide Checkout-less APIs, we'd probably have to go back to the old redirect model, which (among other things) just doesn't work well on mobile. I expect we'll always offer APIs for "standardized" instruments, though (ACH, Bitcoin, cards, etc.).

[pastaking]

This is awesome!

PS author misspelled the link to Stripe Checkout https://stripe.com/chekcout (missing a c)

[siddarthcs]

Oops, thanks for the heads-up: fixing! :)

[mattste]

I'm curious what method they use for identifying the buyers as Chinese.

[iLoch]

They turn on the webcam and look into their soul. Or IP address + locale information like everyone else.

[taigeair]

What do you think about Amazon Payments? How come people don't use it?

[rubycodesearch]

When would Stripe support withdraw to China then? It's the only reason that I'm still using PayPal.

[ars]

Are there any companies that support sending money to other countries? Not just receiving it?

[davecyen]

Will you be allowing marketplaces to transfer money to sellers' Alipay accounts?