Don't worry, the benefits box just isn't localized (yet). We have a draft of a new jobs page we're working on, but figured we should prioritize launching products over it :).
Seems like a solution would be to just have 4 weeks contracted leave which accrues. Then have an open policy on top of that which allows an employee to exceed 4 weeks per year.
Why on earth not? Accrue leave as normal, just allow the balance to go negative (or bottom out at zero). If it's positive when the employee leaves, pay them out.
I wonder if Stripe is planning to launch in New Zealand any time soon - it's very close to Australia :) I'm really keen to stop relying on Paypal for accepting payments.
We are working on New Zealand, but don't have an immediate ETA for an New Zealand beta. Sign up at https://stripe.com/global to be notified when we launch
Whatever you use it will invariably suck in some way. PX is fine, but getting a merchant account sure isn't. All the stripe clones in NZ are balls. Please, Stripe, whatever you're doing to get to NZ, double it!
Using Paypal at the moment, as te_chris said PX pay is decent but requires a merchant account which is expensive and slow to setup. As far as I am aware their aren't any other decent solutions. Kiwipay could be good but at the moment it isn't really suitable for anything more than casual payments.
Aside from merchant account setup, last time I looked (4 years ago), Payment Express worked out to be really expensive when charging in USD. I think it was in part due to merchant account/currency conversion charges by the bank. It was significantly more expensive than Paypal. I don't know if the situation has changed since then.
I know that the only bank that allows international currency transactions is BNZ so they are likely fairly expensive seen as they have an monopoly on it.
Technically (for those who don't know) they allow multiple currency transactions from one/single account. So you may have 1,000 NZD but it's made out of USD, PHP, AUD etc
I looked at it in some detail but they were a pain to assess. Wouldn't give me any details of the API or feature set unless I created an account... for a non-refundable $200 fee. I pointed out how ridiculous this was, and they said that if I went through their signup process and committed to paying the $200, they would let me look at the documentation without actually paying the fee. It was all so vague and ad-hoc I found it pretty hard to trust whatever might be behind the curtain.
(edit: Looks like fee is now $99, and there's a little more detail on their developers page.)
PX pricing is actually pretty good if you've got high transaction volume. But it's terrible for small biz. Most people I know default to Paypal.
Please Stripe, please come to NZ fast. You've been talking about it for more than a year. I know we must look like smaller-poorer Australia, but I promise there are people here who'd use you!
I think it might be OK for one-off payments, but I couldn't find anything other than manual setup of recurring payments on their web site. Price wise it's comparable to Paypal though. The trouble for me is that it doesn't integrate with my shopping cart (getdpd.com).
The currency support that hit the AU beta a month or two ago was the big one for me, but the low rate (1.75% + 30c for Australian cards) is a nice touch for those who might normally smash their heads against a bank's merchant API, PayPal or someone like eWay (who I don't have nice thoughts about).
PayPal Express Checkout starts at 2.4% + 30c (across all trans). One might use PayPal for other reasons than just their fees (i.e. your user demographic) but their API is still a mess.
It's completely anecdotal, but we've used eWay for the past 2 years. They've been slightly cheaper than the alternatives and pleasant to deal with for the most part, but any technical interaction has been incredibly painful. The dashboard is a pain to use, and they generally seem oblivious to trends in payment gateways.
In addition, two months ago we were unable to process payments for a period of a few hours due to an SSL error on their secure payments API. Any customer not using a hosted payment page was affected. From what has been communicated to me it was an issue with their CDN provider, but I'm still waiting on the full details. I understand things happen, but a lack of communication from someone who processes your payments is really frustrating.
On the other hand, Stripe have been really nice to deal with, and integration has been a breeze. Things might change once we put it into production, but I'd be surprised if they got worse.
I did this once stripe announced their beta as I had been waiting for some time. The additions of subscriptions and checkout was attractive. Along with the fact that stripe was more established.
Finally! Where I work we're already discussing moving every (all 6 of them) project that we're working on at the moment over to Stripe. I'm so happy, this was a great start to my Tuesday morning!
fantastic news! I just finished a Stripe integration a day or two ago. Everything I had heard about stripe was true. I've done eWay, PIN and now Stripe integration and Stripe is hands down the easiest to get up and running.
Subscriptions in particular are very well designed. Their documentation is outstanding. I was up and running with a multi-tiered subscription setup in 1 day. The checkout flow is particularly awesome.
For the uninitiated, is there benefit in using Stripe (etc) over a bank merchant facility, when your business is already transacting $80,000+ per month?
Working with an Australian client at the moment about moving more sales online - I don't want to hold back information about other payment processors, but can't see any benefit over their existing bank facilities. What am I missing?
I'm not sure what your conclusion would be, but don't assume that your client is correct about their real cost of transacting.
In Australia, banks will usually offer an online merchant account and a payment gateway (you can also use a third party like eway). When I worked in Australia I usually found that using a third party payment gateway worked best in terms of price. The UI can also matter. Some clients spend a lot of time in there manually processing, reviewing, refunding transactions, running reports, etc.. I had good reports from clients using Eway. Bad reports from clients using NAB. (This is 5+ years ago, so YMMV).
If the difference in price isn't really relevant in absolute terms to the overall cost of the project, I would always strongly recommend the option with better software & customer support.
The pricing structures can be complicated. If you really want to understand them, it's better to run it as an audit. What did it cost the client in the last 12 months. What would it cost them using stripe. Take into account monthly fees, per transaction fees (depends on transaction size and on volume), any anti-fraud fees, chargeback fees. You can actually send the info to stripe (or another third party gateway) aand they'll probably do the analysis for you.
You will probably find that your client is actually paying a little more than they think they are.
It all comes down to money right? Doing that volume probably doesn't make sense to use stripe as px and a merchant account is probably much cheaper due to leverage against the banks. I'm ecstatic about stripe though as it's so hard to start taking payments well here in Australasia. It's a massive boon for small operators.
Thanks Chris - I absolutely agree about small operators, and am looking forward to integrating it with some of my other businesses that (sadly) aren't yet anywhere close to turning over a million bucks a year!
Can some Stripers on this thread give an estimate as to when Stripe will come to Hong Kong or Singapore?
I am bootstrapping a side project with a colleague and literally the only reason to even consider a UK partnership over a Singapore or Hong Kong one is that we want to use Stripe (or whatever clone gets there first).
Any plans for NZ? As you can see with the success of EFTPOS here, we have a history of adopting new payment technologies quickly. I personally have an idea that's just waiting for a proper mobile payment system.
That is awesome! In a project I'm doing we are currently assessing payment gateways and Stripe comes in as a clear first, but since it wasn't previously available for Denmark we had dumped it. Looks like we might not have to do that now!
The alternatives were a bit lacking in Denmark for the kind of payment flow we need. It is reminiscent of the one from Airbnb where the fees are collected in two steps - first from the customer and then for the merchant. We went through Braintree, Paypal, and Paymill among others, but there wasn't a good fit. And it was surprisingly hard to find information about the different payment gateways for a specific country. Really hope we can get access to this beta!
How do you draw invites for the beta and do you do the drawing more than once?
This is fantastic! We've recently gotten a bank's merchant account and eWay as a gateway, but I've been impressed with neither. I'm so glad that Stripe is now available here.
> What actually prevents Stripe from just being international?
The need to partner with a local bank to provide merchant services/accounts. i.e. Pin Payments partners with NAB in Australia, with NAB setting up an "invisible to the user" merchant account. It's part of their model - you just deal with them, not the bank, not anybody else.
I get that's what they do but why do they need to do that for each individual country instead of just running everything through their own bank + only subject to their own state/federal regulations?
Different regulatory requirements and banking systems. For example Stripe still only has support for sending funds to third-party bank bank accounts for US users and US bank accounts.
Someone needs to fix payment culture in Australia and also in Europe. Going to the bar with a large group of people and either paying with:
A) A pocket full of coins
B) A card but only being allowed to pay with one or two for your whole group, is just straight up silly.
Situation B happened to me a million times while I was down there for a year and it's just an annoyance, and carrying a kilo in coins is no fun either. I actually submitted a suggestion to ANZ for them to make some sort of group payment option for restaurants but heard nothing back and couldn't pursue. Hopefully someone can make something easy with Stripe.
Use... Notes?! You know, money... Coins?! Who uses coins? Secondly nobody is going to refuse 5 payments from 5 cards either or they don't get paid. Simple.
Going to be tough for that competitor to survive if they don't pivot from a 'Stripe-clone'. Hope they're well funded and well backed.
You need to do a huge volume of transactions to be able to live off 2.6% + 30c, close to two million a month to support a startup with 5 fully loaded employees including the founders.
Working with a lot of Ecommerce sites I know a well established one (attached to 3 bricks and mortar stores) does on average $16k a month. Say on average an Online store is doing 10k/month you're looking at 200 clients to keep the payment processor afloat. Doable but you'd want them to have some runway otherwise people are gonna go with Stripe to know they've got a payment gateway that's not gonna disappear
