Ask HN: What did Stripe change (Value Add)?
What was the revolutionary thing Stripe enabled that changed payments & commerce ? From what I understand - people could do payments via credit-cards & paypal.
What was the value added from stripe that made it differentiated from the solutions / providers before ?
Pro: they abstracted away the intricacies of getting "KYC" approval to take payments and abstracted the merchant services integration, so a developer could be up and taking payments in hours, rather than weeks/months.
Con: they abstracted the relationship a merchant has with their processor, so now they stand between you and your money, they decide whether you get it or not, or if you're banned or not, and you have no recourse if they decide your story isn't compelling enough.
To add to this, one of their biggest pros was the developer documentation.
The quality of documentation that Stripe had stood out not only in the payment processing space, but in the industry as a whole.
Completely agree, thank you for adding that. Their documentation was a head above the rest; personalizing the example API calls with your key/token included within the documentation made it trivial to try it out and see something working almost immediately.
I think they made it far, far easier to implement them as a payment provider vs PayPal etc. That was the first innovation.