Slashdot Mirror

http://bjk5.com/post/718871964...
"Every team has two email addresses: one for team members and one for the team's "blackhole." [For example: ] analytics-team@khanacademy.org and analytics-blackhole@khanacademy.org.
    The -team@ address is for emailing all members of the team. When you send email to analytics-team@, you expect everyone on the analytics team to read it. Subscribing to analytics-team@ means analytics-related email will land in your priority inbox as soon as it's sent, and you're expected to read it.
    The -blackhole@ address is for anything else that has anything to do with analytics. When you CC:analytics-blackhole@, you don't expect subscribers to immediately read it. Subscribing to analytics-blackhole@ means you'll receive analytics-related email, but it'll get filtered out of your inbox and you're not expected to read it unless you feel like it. ... Anybody in the org can join any of these email lists. analytics-team@ is usually just team members, but analytics-blackhole@ has all sorts of lookie-loo subscribers who're interested in analytics happenings."

The approach was derived from how Stripe does it: https://stripe.com/blog/email-...

So, given the original story, maybe this transparency approach has an extra side effect (perhaps unintended) of maintaining trust in an organization by avoiding the "directly CC-ing the boss" effect?

It's not quite BCCing the whole company -- like Tesen joked -- as it is more organized. But essentially the whole company could in theory read (almost) anything with that approach.

If you have an online presence and sell products/services I highly recommend Stripe.

The problem is signing up with all of these payment providers is a hassle to small businesses.

I build websites for a living. Some even ecommerce. I'm my own sites I only accept payments via Credit Card (through Stripe), because it's mostly universal by supporting most of the credit card providers out there, and Stripes custom integration while still being PCI-DSS compliant is very straight forward.

They've recently rolled out support for Apple Pay, but the documentation was confusing if you use a custom integration, so I simply haven't done that yet.

Paypal can be useful, and it's on my list of things to do. I use it myself sometimes, so I should make it available to those who prefer it.

Other than that, I'm not going to seek out a dozen other services that take time and money to set up and integrate because it's too hard to type in credit card details.

Having never been in a firearms store, let alone purchase one, what do "real" firearm shops use as a payment processor? Surely they take credit cards, don't they?

Stripe makes it clear that they don't want to participate in transactions for regulated products and services. I don't see what the problem with that is.

I use Elavon they have no issues with a gun business.

Having never been in a firearms store, let alone purchase one, what do "real" firearm shops use as a payment processor? Surely they take credit cards, don't they?

Stripe makes it clear that they don't want to participate in transactions for regulated products and services. I don't see what the problem with that is.

There is no cloud service provider that is approved for handling credit card information at this time. That is not an accident.

It's not clear which flavor of "cloud" you're referring to.

If you mean IaaS, Amazon AWS is PCI certified:

https://aws.amazon.com/complia...

If you mean PaaS, WIndows Azure is certified:

http://azure.microsoft.com/blo...

If you mean SaaS, Stripe is certified:

https://stripe.com/help/securi...

Of course, even if the service provider is certified, it's up to the customer to ensure that their own implementation is compliant - the service provider certification is just one checkmark in the requirements.

The market that's more curious to me is the "card not present" market...payment processors for websites. Stripe seems to be the darling of the Slashdot crowd, but their pricing is horrible. They offer 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and won't offer to discount it until you're doing $1M+ per year. Contrast with Paypal's Payment Pro which drops down first to 2.5%+$0.30 once you hit $3k/month, then down to 2.2%+$0.30 once you hit $10k/month. Stripe has a few features that PPP doesn't, but they would need to be real important to you to pay that much more.

But wait, there's more! An actual bank will probably charge you 2.0%+$0.30 for virtually zero volume (I'm on 2.2%+$0.50 NZD so about $0.40 USD but we're known for being more expensive). Plus, an actual bank will offer you the benefit of the 3DS liability shift (which PayPal/Stripe will not).

So why does anyone use these services again?

This shouldn't be a big surprise...the flat rate plan was clearly a loss-leader meant to gain marketshare.

Most of the fee you pay to companies like Square doesn't go to them. It goes towards the "Interchange Fee" charged by Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX. These interchange fees vary based on card type (for example, fees are higher on "reward cards"...that's what funds the "reward"), and transaction type ("card not present", for example, has a higher rate). Check over the interchange fees for Visa and MasterCard, and you'll see that Square doesn't have a lot of room to move below 2.75% and still make money.

The three big players in this "mobile payments" space are Paypal Here (2.7%), Intuit's GoPayment (2.75% flat, or $12.95/M + 1.75%) or, the aforementioned Square (2.75%). At the moment, if you're swiping more than $1295/M, Intuit's $12.95+1.75% would be the best choice...unclear though, how long that plan will be around since it's a loss-leader as well.

The market that's more curious to me is the "card not present" market...payment processors for websites. Stripe seems to be the darling of the Slashdot crowd, but their pricing is horrible. They offer 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and won't offer to discount it until you're doing $1M+ per year. Contrast with Paypal's Payment Pro which drops down first to 2.5%+$0.30 once you hit $3k/month, then down to 2.2%+$0.30 once you hit $10k/month. Stripe has a few features that PPP doesn't, but they would need to be real important to you to pay that much more.

https://stripe.com/ ?

I've been converting my website clients to Stripe, now that they are available in Canada.

These are clients I set up when they were just starting up and had no other means of accepting credit cards. Most now have merchant accounts, but some have transaction fees through the roof, Stripe has better rates in most cases and no monthly fees.