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by wenbin·3y ago·view on hn ↗
In the early years of ListenNotes.com , one of the most impactful decisions I made was to integrate PayPal, in addition to Stripe. It's true that PayPal's integration process is less developer-friendly; I had to devote considerable time and energy to comprehend the intricacies of PayPal and Braintree, and there was a substantial period of trial and error. However, once completed, the system has proven to be impressively robust. In fact, I haven't had to modify the code for around four years.

The outcomes have been more than satisfactory:

- When it comes to Listen Notes, PayPal dominates as the preferred method of payment outside the US.

- In terms of managing chargebacks, PayPal has significantly outperformed Stripe for us. With an approximate win rate of 100%, it far exceeds Stripe's virtually zero success rate.

This experience underscores the need to look beyond initial developer convenience and consider factors such as global user preferences and chargeback management. Despite the initial time investment, the long-term benefits of integrating PayPal have been remarkable.

4 comments
I use PayPal when buying digital products priced in USD because local banks approve those transactions automatically. When I try to pay via card directly, I have to call them to enable those transactions which is a hassle. It's not surprising PayPal is popular internationally.
Get a free revolut (and be careful of their traps to extort you money)

The payment side of revolut is great and what modern banking should look like.

Virtual cards, flexible limits, don't bother you much with retarded Anti Money Laundering checks

Do you have to enable it every time you make a transaction?
It's enabled for a certain period of time (usually a few hours) and I can do transactions during that time period.
Stripe is great in some ways but definitely far from perfect and I've spent many hours chatting with support for multiple clients, and while it's cool you can instantly get someone to start chatting with you, not all the support agents are equal in understanding. It's also cool that their API has so many options, but sometimes I feel like there's so much there that it's hard for their docs to keep up and you can get lost in the weeds occasionally. So recently when I saw the Jumpstart Rails guys were mentioning Paddle, I wondered if paying a premium would be worth it for something that's more of a "full-service" option. For a long time, many developers have been scared away from Paypal, but when you are focused on solving business problems, what looks most awesome to developers (Sripe) isn't necessarily what's most awesome for cutting to the chase on solving business problems and handling things that are going to cost the business more in the long run, e.g. Paypal or Paddle going to bat for you, or like when Paddle handles some other financial minutiae that they're good at such as handling taxes internationally, etc.
I have a side business ~1k€ MRR (~3k€ total if including other payment methods) on paddle and I have more weird issues with customers not being able to pay or having issues with payments. I had to create a yearly plan just so that people wouldn't have to face issues every month.

Fees are a bit higher than stripe (but not that much, especially if stripe charges you forex conversion fees).

Not dealing with european taxes is great and completely worth it (my side business would not be viable if I had to do vatmoss accounting, F U Europe). Refunds are on them which is nice.

Api integration was significantly worse than stripe.

They didn't migrate customers from stripe because I didn't have enough customers.

They seem to be technically poor but it's a good business idea.

I hope this is not costing me customers, albeit I have other ways people can subscribe to.

So... a mixed bag. I'd try lemonsqueezy if I were you.

Revin looked great a few years ago but it's quite pricey these days for small businesses.

I can understand using PayPal if it's an option because you can't be bothered getting your card and typing in. How many people would not do a purchase just because of this? It's a non zero number but I'm not sure if it warrants their fees.

I hate PayPal with a passion (I get paid with PayPal and I know how shitty is the other side) so I try to make the effort and use my card to not give them money.

Good to know about chargebacks.

Apart from the initial efforts that go into the setup, how do you manage day-to-day ops with multiple dashboards?
What do you mean by "day-to-day operations with multiple dashboards"?

I seldom log into either the PayPal or Stripe dashboards. I've developed several integrations into our internal tools to streamline processes. For example, these integrations allow us to view all payment transactions across different platforms and handle refunds.

Both PayPal and Stripe have been configured to automatically deposit payouts into our company's bank accounts each day. This feature initially required us to contact PayPal to enable it (via PHONE CALL!), while with Stripe it could be activated with a single click.

You should be using the API integrations to pull all your payment sources into your own dashboard.
Are there any open-source software that let you create a dashboard integrating payments from multiple payment sources?
But wouldn't that consume a significant amount of your dev efforts? OP's dashboard seems to be solving for it already.
> consume a significant amount of your dev efforts

If managing revenue is a core component of your business, as it is for most non-startup companies, in-housing a handful of API calls then transforming storing and visualizing the data is a worthy investment.

As the OP indicated they've barely had to touch it for 4 years. A couple weeks of effort and a few hours of maintenance here or there can be superior to another ephemeral third party vendor that can grind your core business to a halt with an outage, acquisition, pricing change, etc.

Absolutely.

As you accrue more experience in the software industry, whether as an engineer or a technical founder, it's not as though you become capable of writing code ten times faster. What truly increases isn't your typing speed, but rather the leverage you gain from developing an intuition for discerning what to build versus what not to build, as well as what to purchase versus what to create from the ground up.

Furthermore, the situation isn't always black and white. There's a middle ground. Initially, you might lean on third-party solutions, gradually replacing them with in-house solutions bit by bit. You may even find yourself with a mix of in-house and third-party solutions. There's no need for it to be an absolute 100% in-house or 100% third-party solution. You could have a 49% in-house and 51% third-party mix, or perhaps an 80% in-house and 20% third-party split.

There are no standard templates to follow. It's all on a case-by-case basis. However, a general principle I found useful is that the more closely a decision ties to revenue generation, the more control you should ideally exert over it.