Some Stripe questions

Teup

I'm considering opening back up on BrickOwl next month and I've just set up Stripe and I think I have succesfully added iDeal as a payment method. Some questions I still have:

- What are the costs? I found somewhere it said "1.4% + €0.25" for European "cards" (not entirely sure what it means) - so does this apply to all payments received in the EU regardless of payment method?

- What is the external iDeal option that BrickOwl offers? Does it mean that if I have my own iDeal setup I can use that without using Stripe? But it seems I can't really set any options for it, so (how) does it work?

- If I understand correctly Stripe is a service that collects payments through different channels and then pays out - does it mean that buyers can use iDeal to pay worldwide, if the store owner has checked the iDeal box? And, reversely, are there any foreign payment methods in that list that for me are worth allowing in my store? Or actually.. is there any reason to not just go ahead and enable the whole bunch of them?

paulvdb

Stripe charges a flat fee of € 0.29 for iDeal payments. Only buyers in the Netherlands can pay with iDeal. But I think sellers everywhere can offer it. Not sure about that.

See https://stripe.com/en-nl/pricing/local-payment-methods for fees for all payment methods.

Stellar

Right, you can enable all of them, I did so and already received some payments that way

Teup

@paulvdb thanks, great! Stripe seems very reasonable. Those fees are the same as when you have your own iDeal implementation, and for that you need to have a business bank account.

The only problem with so many different kinds of fees is that it will be hard to keep track of accurate numbers of all the fee costs on every order in my administration. But it looks like BrickOwl properly labels individual types of Stripe payments properly, so it shouldn't be too much work to make my software figure out the correct numbers.

paulvdb

Stripe's csv export has the fee for every payment, so you can easily use that to get the Stripe fees for your orders.

Geert Middelman

I stopped caring about the Stripe or Paypal fees per order/transaction, and just book everything at the end of the month when consolidating. In bookkeeping I treat both Stripe and Paypal as their own 'bank account', and the fees are booked as bank charges at the end of the month. Both Paypal and Stripe offer a csv export with charges, which I can 'easily' import in Quickbooks.

When starting I tried to keep track of it per order, but the additional work doesn't outweigh the benefits.

Teup

Thanks!
That makes sense. I think I'll do it myself though, I already put a function in place that will convert the payment method and country that comes in from the API data to the transaction fees. Now it's just about keeping them up to date should they ever change

Geert Middelman

Oh and if you're turning things around rather quickly, give Stripe a call to reduce the payout timespan. Back when I lived in the Netherlands, after having about 25 orders through stripe without any high risk transaction or chargebacks I called them and they changed it to just three days. Helped a lot with cashflow.

Here in the States Stripe works a bit different, less flexible payouts, but cashflow is a bit more comfortable nowadays.

Teup

That's good to know, thanks for the advice!