I’ve written a lot about Stripe on here in recent years, mostly singing it’s praises as a great new, easy and cheap way to accept credit card payments from clients. Lately however it’s begun to annoy me that no progress has been made with getting the bank transfer times down for Irish customers. It still takes 7 – 9 days and I find myself groaning a little each time someone pays me via Stripe as I know it’s going to affect my cash flow. I’d prefer if they used PayPal or Bank Transfer at this stage so I get my money within a day or 2 max. Stripe are pretty slow to respond to support queries too and any time I ask them about the slow transfer times they roll out the same cut & paste response. This is my only real issue with Stripe however. It’s still pretty cool apart from that.
Braintree Payments are a newish credit card processor that I seem to keep hearing about this year. They are a PayPal owned company and offer essentially the exact same service as Stripe, ie – you sign up for a free account with no monthly fees and they offer credit card payment integration on your website, virtual terminal etc, charging just a percentage of each transaction. Braintree like Stripe also integrates easily with my invoicing system Zoho Invoice and you can get scripts, plugins etc for your website though the choice/range might be slightly smaller than for Stripe. At the minute the fees are pretty much the same as Stripe.
Here’s the things that interest me the most and what might make me switch from Stripe:
Fees
Braintree currently take NO fees for your first €50k income which could be a saving of hundreds each year for me for about the next few years at least. The fees are zero for the first €50k whether you use Braintree itself or the integrated PayPal payments option*.
Transfer Times
They also guarantee bank transfer times of 2 – 4 days max (including Ireland*), nearly half of Stripe’s which is damn significant. Braintree also integrates with Paypal so you can easier accept PayPal payments via a credit card form on your site so you can still get PayPal’s 1 – 2 day max transfer time.
Having just signed up for a Braintree account I must say I much prefer the Stripe website and dashboard. Braintree’s site seems awkward and overly complex but money talks! It’s worth giving Braintree a bash for a while at least I think.
Leon
* Confrimed by Braintree support.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
After a month or so of using Braintree I can confirm that it works fine and transfers are a little quicker than Stripe although the first few are only marginally quicker. HOWEVER I have had to abondon my Braintree account and revert to Stripe because of a series of fraudulent transactions that happened on Christmas Eve and day. There were over 100 un-requested payments totaling over €3,000 made to me by people I don’t know over those 2 days ranging from a few cents to €1,000 and all were made via a third party script on my website but were processed by Braintree and lined up for transfer to my bank account which could have caused all kinds of chargeback hassle and fees with my bank. I was in contact with Braintree’s support and risk departments and feel that they were of almost no help. They seemed to suggest that I may owe them money if the fraudulent transactions weren’t dealt with quickly by me and went to a chargeback situation which I didn’t understand at all. Braintree doesn’t appear to have any risk, fraud or security prevention setup by default and some of the payments that were made to me were different names with the same credit card number which shouldn’t be allowed happen by any modern payment processor in my opinion. Nothing else like this ever happened during my 2+ years with Stripe and I feel they are a safer bet still despite the slow transfers.
NOTE:
Also, since I started using Braintree, Stripe have reduced their fees considerably from about 2.5% to 1.4% so if they can just get those transfer times down and answer emails quicker they could still be the perfect solution.
Reverb Studios Design 