Nice calculator; but it misses the currency conversion costs. You can't get $9.46 as a UK merchant - you get paid in £GBP and they add another 2% from mid-market rate - so $9.27 would be more accurate.
Stripe.com says Charges made in a currency for which you haven't connected a bank account will be converted to your default currency. A 2% fee applies for currency conversion, and all fees are calculated in the currency we transfer to you.
So you can avoid it by having an USD / EUR account. Or you have to pay this 2% fee. I will add a note to the page.
Not really; they only send USD via ACH currently (don't support wire transfer) so as a UK merchant there is no way to actually get paid $USD even if you have a $USD bank account.
We'd love to move to Stripe; the one issue is that you can't send us $USD to our UK based $USD account via a wire transfer (like Amex does for example). Instead, it seems the only option is for you to send us £GBP after charging another 2% on top. This is both expensive currency conversion; but we also spend $USD so have to pay to turn our £GBP back into $USD!
I don't understand this, you can put decent volume through a forex broker and get conversions at something like .1% Surely it would make sense to do this at cost for customers?
Granted your bank will probably want a decent chunk for doing the conversion for you.
Why are ATMs not 100% flat with 3 holes - for a keypad, note delivery and a hole for the bank card to go in. A skimming device can then not be added without making it very obvious the ATM has been altered.
An ATM could also have a video camera installed that monitors the area where the card is entered - if something changes the ATM does not work and a warning message is displayed.
Agreed, this is a massive pain - I'd love to start using them but I need to bill in USD, and getting a US bank account from the UK is a big unknown.
I spoke to them at their hack day in London at the beginning of April, and they said they expected to solve this in 1-3 months. So hopefully within the next 6 weeks if we're optimistic!
That's good to know. I've not put Stripe live because of this. It all looks great, but the inability to handle multiple currencies is a deal breaker for now.
GBP, USD, and EUR are a minimum, imo. Been doing that elsewhere since the 1990s. That's not meant to be snarky, simply factual.
Did they give any indication of how they're going to solve it?
Hopefully something as 'simple' as USD charges getting sent to my GBP account, taking a forex hit along the way. I'd rather that than the red tape of setting up a US account.
Personally I want them to send $USD to a UK bank in $US. I set one of these up with barclays; it was trivial and low fees. Can then use transferwise to get $USD into £GBP and avoid the 2.5% forex tax our lovely banks charge.
You can accept payments with credit and debit cards from customers anywhere in the world. Currently the Stripe UK and Ireland betas support Visa and MasterCard, with American Express payments coming soon
