Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly.
Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe in fees has to be pulled from a shudder export of all transactions), handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes on unfortunately.
I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies (specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us.
Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about the front-end, metaphorically speaking.
I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's too catered to the devs.
Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of feedback if someone wants to listen.
I 100% agree with this. Stripe is fun for startups with <100'000 / year revenue, but then it gets ugly. The reporting can't be configured at all and is highly cumbersome, especially if you need something slightly different than they offer for comparability (e.g. last 7 days, last 28 vs last 30 days), and Stripe is not transparent about their fees at all in the back-end.
I'll add my 2c and say I disagree entirely. We ship mid-seven figures through Stripe yearly and I enjoy the back-end still to this day - have been using it right after it was /dev/payments and still kicking all these years on my main small business and small projects alike.
I don't see the need for "reporting" from the Stripe website as I think most businesses should be doing it on their own in their own tooling, but in the cases I want to quickly look things up, Stripe's back-end has been just fine as well.
And what is the business case and cost for "we should develop software to fill in the missing features of payment provider x instead of simply going with y"?
hi, same thought as above - if you're open to chatting about it, I'd love to learn more about how we can improve reporting for you. I'm at kathy@stripe.com
Hey blizkreeg, I'm the product manager on Reporting & Analytics at Stripe. Sorry to hear that your experience hasn't been great - mind sending me an email at kathy@stripe.com? I'd love to chat more and see if we can improve the reporting experience for you.
> The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us.
This is odd. We have hundreds of monthly customers and ship physical + digital products, handle returns, disputes, and so forth fairly well.
Support has been good for us as well, if unconventional, so I'll agree with the lack of a direct line access to an AM/AE being annoying... but ultimately it hasn't stopped us from doing anything timely.
We have a SaaS product in addition to physical retailing and Stripe works very well for us and I don't see how it won't for years to come. We use third-party systems in addition to Stripe for inventory management, fulfillment, and we do reporting from pulling raw data into our own back-end and doing the work there (which... I'm pretty sure is standard with most small tech businesses, as you have much more granular control over things), so I guess we just almost entirely disagree with each other.
I think your suggestions are good... I just don't see them as being anything more than sustainment features for me.
Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe in fees has to be pulled from a shudder export of all transactions), handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes on unfortunately.
I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies (specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us.
Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about the front-end, metaphorically speaking.
I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's too catered to the devs.
Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of feedback if someone wants to listen.