Stripe: Alipay support (opens in new tab)

On a personal level, I'm very excited to know that I won't have to try and integrate Alipay in any of our products anymore. It's nightmare to deal with, even for our Chinese team.

But for Stripe, it's a huge step forward into tapping in a massive market. Most Chinese people can't (or won't) use card to pay online; they simply have Alipay connected to their bank account or use prepaid cards. Good move Stripe.

This is a huge deal. I'm currently in Shenzhen and Alipay (支付宝) is a common and convenient way to make payments, on Taobao, in person, or otherwise. Alipay is an interesting product in its own right, even if examined independently of the Alibaba Group. It has a money market service, Yu'E Bao (余额宝) that is currently a top 3 global money market fund with $89B AUM. That's a taste of the scale of the market in China.

http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-201...

A question which no one has asked yet: what are the fees? Alipay charges a flat 3% while Stripe normally (for credit cards) charges 2.9%+$0.30. The variable cost to Stripe from a credit card processor is (of course) lower than 2.9% (so Stripe has a margin), 3% is (clearly) not (the fixed $0.30 only helping for small transactions). Will Stripe be charging more (variable, to have a margin) and/or less (fixed, to pass on the lack of a fixed interchange fee to customers) than its usual credit card processing fees when a customer is using Alipay? (An answer may also shine some light on whether Alipay is profit sharing with Stripe to get Stripe's support or if Stripe is being forced to charge on top of Alipay to get access to their users.)

This is great news for those using Stripe Checkout. Are there any plans to offer Alipay to Stripe customers who are utilizing the API for subscriptions, invoicing, and recurred payments?

As an aside, we also get a load of client requests for PayPal as an alternative simply because many people don't have a US-based credit card. If you're making the moves to support global markets, it's tough to side step them.

I really wish PayPal brought back their digital credit card which you could preload with cash and use online like a real credit/debit card. It would solve all of our problems with users who don't have a CC!

If you guys would do this exact same thing for PayPal, I would be so happy.

three questions:

1 - Will you handle micropayments (i.e. not rake 30 cents on top of 3%)? Alipay excels at this.

2 - Can some/all of the RMB sent to the Alipay account not get exchanged to USD and auto transferred to the Stripe account holder's bank account? This is a common use case to pay for China-side costs and not have RMB exchanged to USD and exchanged back to RMB to pay partners/vendors.

3 - Will you have servers inside China? If you don't you will need some incredibly fault-tolerant javascript and page load magic as some of your interactions with non-China servers will fail.

This is a very interesting development, partly for being a useful feature for some merchants in its own right, but perhaps also if it signals a more general move from Stripe toward supporting a broader range of payment methods through a unified API. That strategy seems to dovetail neatly with accepting payments in multiple currencies, which was something else Stripe developed not so long ago but isn't much use alone where the local conventional payment methods don't involve credit cards.

Now we just need to see Stripe come to the other countries, which doesn't yet have access to them (I have Denmark in mind).

I wish there was a non-JS version of Stripe Checkout. Rather than throwing up the modal window, I'd prefer to redirect my users to a Stripe hosted checkout page where they can make payment and we can deal with it via webhooks. Similar to how PayPal works really.

Currently I'm integrating with the API directly to do this but I'd have preferred to use a page hosted by Stripe, especially considering they are starting to open up to other payment methods.

Alipay payments will all be nominated in Yuan (RMB). How does Stripe convert this back to USD? The laws of converting currency in China are very restrictive.

Wow this is awesome. I had to integrate Alipay into a checkout process in ~2010 and it was a complete nightmare - and not even as a result of the language barrier. The API was just so so bad. Glad this is in Stripe now.

Kudos to Stripe for adding this. Having working on an Alipay integration via another provider, I know there is business demand for this.

How does Stripe deal with the currency conversion? Is this tracked by Alipay on an individual level (i.e. so consumers can't spend more then the legal conversion amount of 50k USD)?

As a Canadian, I'm most interested in when Stripe will start supporting our Interac debit cards. At that point, from my point of view, it'll have taken over the world. :)

If we don't use stripe checkout, would there still be a way to integrate this using the APIs?

This is awesome!

PS author misspelled the link to Stripe Checkout https://stripe.com/chekcout (missing a c)

I'm curious what method they use for identifying the buyers as Chinese.

What do you think about Amazon Payments? How come people don't use it?

When would Stripe support withdraw to China then? It's the only reason that I'm still using PayPal.

Are there any companies that support sending money to other countries? Not just receiving it?

Will you be allowing marketplaces to transfer money to sellers' Alipay accounts?