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Bandcamp switching to Stripe is almost purely POSITIVE for artists, Stripe are NOT evil, they are forced to follow Visa and MasterCard censorship, as is PayPal; Stripe historically has been vastly better for small businesses and artists than PayPal; do NOT tell them to cancel this!
It would be better if they offered both Stripe and PayPal as an option however! If you're going to bully Bandcamp, please tell them to allow both rather than forcing everyone to use Stripe, choice of payment provider is never a bad thing when your artist livelihood is at stake
we'll walk back the “purely positive” thing, Stripe have many good points but if Bandcamp forces everyone to switch from PayPal to Stripe, it's swapping a devil everyone knows for a devil most Bandcamp users don't, and it will suck for certain users, so please ask for CHOICE
@hikari stripe is a vast improvement on paypal, but to call them ‘not evil’ is quite the stretch
regardless, yeah bandcamp will probably be fine on stripe and I approve of dropping paypal as they are by far the worst PSP for enforcing their leadership's moral values on merchants
@erincandescent @hikari exactly, stripe is an extremely rational actor
one big downside to them is that they are the cloudflare of payments, very easy to get started and serves sites at incredible scale but if you do anything weird, someone looking at a chargeback report who doesn't know your business will laser you out of existence with an uphill battle for support
@hikari I mean, they *could* offer adult/high-risk payment processing without violating MC/Visa policies and choose not to; that's a negotiation with their acquiring-bank partners that they've decided not to go through
@hikari Others have commented on more relevant stuff regarding Stripe so I'll bring up my personal axe to grind with them even before all this kicked off that's completely unrelated to charge backs, 18+ material, etc
Stripe claim they only take something like a 3% processing fee (plus currency conversion) but on at least three occasions for payments in the £10 - £50 range they actually took 25-55% of the payment in fees with no explanation given (despite similar amounts to the same people in same currency being closer to 5%) most of the time
It's one thing if half the money actually goes to them for very small transactions (I'll note Bandcamp does a lot of sales for $5 or less) due to a minimum cost for processing plus fees...but when they took over half of a $20 payment that was meant for mutual aid I was baffled and upset by that
The fact these unexpectedly large fees have happened multiple times now (thankfully the 55% was a one-off, but them taking a quarter of a £40 transfer is still absurd even with currency conversion) and it's for GBP > USD and GBP > EUR which I normally don't have problems with is just bewildering and makes me not trust Stripe much, even as a lesser evil to PayPal
(And this is just transactions were the payee told me they got much less than expected and shared receipts, I don't even know how often they take these larger cuts for payments when me and the payee aren't in contact!)