Pivity

Goodbye PayPal, welcome Stripe!

Last read Never
#1

At the start of January PayPal introduced some changes to their User Agreement, which included a fee for transferring money to a US bank account from a Norwegian PayPal account.

Upon withdrawing money from PayPal into our (Transfer)Wise account at the end of January we were faced with a $1,800 fee. This makes up about 20% of our monthly profits, which is completely unacceptable. We contacted PayPal to hear more about the fee and whether it could be rescinded, to which the response was negative and dismissed immediately.

After moving the money to our Wise account we made the tough decision of moving away from PayPal and switching to a new alternative, Stripe.

The past month we’ve been working hard on implementing Stripe into the wallet, and after two payouts we’ve finally finished. 


The situation is not completely negative, however, as there are some positives with making a switch to Stripe:

  1. Fewer chargebacks/disputes due to Stripe Radar
  2. No $1,800 (~20% of profits) monthly fee for GmodStore for transferring money to the Wise bank account
  3. Potentially more customers as PayPal is region blocked in a lot of countries.
  4. More regular payouts for our merchants should be possible after we’ve acquainted ourselves with Stripe’s financial tools 📈


The negatives for switching to Stripe and dropping PayPal follow:

  1. Stepping into the unknown. This means we could potentially have fewer customers, but we don’t know this yet. 


We’ll be keeping a close eye on sales statistics in coming months, and if a clear negative trend emerges we may have to re-enable PayPal as a secondary payment option.

Here’s a preview of what the Stripe checkout page looks like:

We'll initially support the following payment methods on the Stripe checkout page:

  1. Card
  2. Alipay
  3. Apple Pay (only available on iPhones)
  4. Google Pay (only available on Chrome)


If you have any questions or concerns regarding our move to Stripe please let us know!


Don’t have a debit or credit card?

You can try using one of the following services:

  1. Revolut
  2. Bunq
  3. Monzo
  4. Wise
  5. N26


If you're from the US you may want to give privacy.com a try if your bank does not allow international payments.


What's next?

Moving forward we will be working on adding support for more currencies, starting off with the euro. When that's completed we should be able to provide payment methods like: Bancontact (Belgium), iDEAL (Netherlands), Multibanco (Portugal), Przelewy24 (Poland), EPS (Austria), Giropay (Germany), Sofort (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain)

Disagree x 18Friendly x 10Dumb x 7Confused x 5Agree x 4Winner x 4Informative x 1
#2

Agree x 6Disagree x 1Confused x 1Winner x 1
#3

Interesting.

I'm glad to hear we're dumping PayPal, there's been a number of increasing incomprehensible policy decisions from PP, and I'm glad GMS is one less place I have to deal with them.

Disagree x 4Agree x 2Winner x 1
#4

<<>>

Congratulations x 1
#5

Are there plans to support iDEAL?

Dumb x 3Agree x 1
#6

We have plans to do so, but it requires us to deal with currency conversions as Stripe requires us to charge in Euros to support iDEAL. We currently do not have support for currency conversions. It's kind of a technical slope to overcome.

Winner x 1
#7

the future is near!

#8

Seriously tho checked this out and yeah, it's waay more seamless than PayPal's checkout, and on top of that means better stuff for both creators and gmodstore. Happy to see this finally happen.

Friendly x 2
#9

This is awesome.

Disagree x 3
#10

Couldnt you basicly use https://blockchain.info/ticker to know the current conversion or are there other issues than knowing the rate?

#11

The challenge is when transactions are created in the Everyday Wallet. Every transaction is immutable, and the balance is always stored in USD. Because we don't know the actual amount of USD we receive until a transaction is completed, we need to re-jig the logic to not create a transaction until after the payment is already completed.

This sounds easy, but it basically means we need to recalculate what each receiver shall receive after a transaction is completed. Currently we already know the amount each person in the chain will receive prior to a transaction being completed, as we only use one currency.

This would also result in higher fees due to a currency conversion fee, coupled with VAT needing to be exact. Creators would likely be advised to set a slightly higher price in for example EUR when this is implemented, though. (This means we don't need to know the currency conversion rate ever, since it's controlled by each creator)

Winner x 1
#12

Thank you for taking the time to implement this.

Friendly x 2
#13

#14

>tough decision

Funny x 1
#15

Yes yes let's make everything as difficult as possible to prevent transactions

Agree x 9Dumb x 5Confused x 3Congratulations x 1
#16

Hi, could you come talk to us via a site ticket and help us better understand your issue?

#17

I support this. 💖

Disagree x 1
#18

now I cant spend my life savings of $0 in paypal on gmodstore :(

#19

Well... Stripe is not operating in Argentina, so F to the Argentinian Community of the Gmodstore. $200 invested in the platform, and possible future purchases for projects thrown away to the trash.

#20

Stripe should work fine in Argentina, the only countries that Stripe currently doesn't support payments from are Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Crimea Region, and Syria. If you're unable to pay due to an error, would you be able to open a site ticket?

Users viewing this thread
Nobody