I've been working on a website for used car buyers who want to skip handling the pre purchase inspection step themselves by having everything already done. It's a new version of the peer-to-peer marketplace with some tweaks to avoid problems that companies like beepi ran into. The hope is by focusing on higher-end foreign cars, which are much harder to sell for a good price to large auto dealers, we can carve out a bit of a niche market.
Car buyers can ensure that all the vehicles service has been done appropriately and the inspection shows any indication of potential repair costs coming down the road. All seemed good!
The interesting thing this week though was that after assuming I could use Stripe connect, I chatted with one of their growth team members and apparently they didn't 'like the business model' such that they won't facilitate payments for the company. Now, there are definitely other options and I will make it work, but I definitely did not see that coming. The application fits quite well into their 'Stripe Connect' marketplace functionality so it took me a bit by surprise.
Stripe is great for handling basic CC payments on SaaS software but be warned - if you are venturing into anything outside of the immediately basic, they may just avoid the risk. My guess is that if you have some revenue they'd be more willing to investigate more.
Moral of the story - check before you assume you can use Stripe with your new business.
Top comments (5)
Every year Stripe and other payment providers are adding lot of new restrictions. Eventually Stripe is restricted by all partner banks and stripe is just a mediator and has not ability to override any of bank's rules.
This is the reason bitcoin was born and slowly and eventually bitcoin will replace credit cards. It took couple of decades for credit card to become mainstream, it will take few years for bitcoin to become mainstream.
I agree - I think the decentralized payments will hopefully be integrated, but the problem is that you still need banks at the end to bring money in / out. I'm worried they will just commandeer the concept and improve minorly
That’s really strange - you had to ask them to use the connect API? My business is using stripe’s checkout API and it’s super simple to set up, we didn’t have to ask them for permission.
Yea so i made the mistake of reaching out to them regarding their fees. In that process they decided to just not allow me to us it. What's your biz model/ site?
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