look into WePay

[chadwhitacre]

Somehow missed WePay when switching away from Samurai (#58). Here's their marketplace use case.

[chadwhitacre]

I got a phone call from a sales rep. He was on the merchant side and not the "API side," but said he'd pass me along to them.

[chadwhitacre]

Haven't heard back from these folks, and now we're live with Balanced (#78). Closing.

[lookfirst]

After a lot of analysis and consideration, I used WePay for my company which really depends on the marketplace feature. I think you should have spent more time on this, we've been really happy with them. One feature they have over the competition is refunds that credit all fees to both parties. Despite you getting lost with their sales people, their engineering team has been very responsive to us. For example, their google analytics integration was something I suggested to them and they turned around and implemented it within a short amount of time.

[chadwhitacre]

I've been hearing from a sales rep looking to pick this up. I've invited him to join in here if he really wants to have a public conversation about Gittip's needs and what @wepay has to offer instead of (!) or in addition to @balanced.

[jkwade]

@whit537 @wepay, let me know if you need anything from Balanced. Happy to help.

[LeBlanc]

Hi All,

I am the lead developer for the API at WePay. Thanks for inviting WePay to the discussion. I'll try to keep this high level and if folks have follow up questions, I'll respond accordingly.

Here are a couple of advantages of using the WePay API

• We provide a compliant and super simple on-boarding flow for your fundraisers via OAuth2.
  *We accept ACH and credit cards for payments. You can either use your own forms, or use our highly optimized embedded iframe checkout.
• We have an awesome customer support center to help your fundraisers and their donors to deal with questions, refunds, chargebacks, fraud...etc. Our support team will learn about your site and work with your support team to better help your customers.
• We run a proprietary fraud engine that looks at multiple factors, including social media, to help protect our merchants. Our dispute process makes it easy to handle chargebacks or other issues.
• We've raised $20 mm of VC, processing millions of dollars a week, and growing rapidly; we're here to stay

We deal with many large crowdfunding platforms and we work with them every day to improve fraud detection and customer support. We typically encourage platforms to add us as an option and A/B test us against their other payment options. Ultimately, you should use the payments processor that has the highest conversion rates, and supports your customers the best.

Please let me know if there are any specific questions you have or if there is anything at all we can help with!

Thanks!
Andrew

[jkwade]

Sweet! Welcome aboard @LeBlanc.

[chadwhitacre]

IRC

[Changaco]

WePay is nice, but AFAICT they don't let us handle all user interactions, and since they don't seem to have full i18n it'd be a step backwards in terms of UX.

[lookfirst]

@Changaco It is the difference between WePay Connect and WePay Clear.

With Clear, you assume a lot more of the PCI compliance. That is why they offer two 'versions' of the service.

In my experience using the Connect version for about 4 years now, it hasn't been an issue on the customer end.

If there is i18n languages that they don't support, it is worth talking with WePay about getting translations for them. They have always been responsive to me about these things.

[chadwhitacre]

In both products, WePay communicates with merchants and payers through a variety of emails. With WePay Clear, partners are given opportunities to insert their brand into these emails and manage the communication process—although the emails are sent from WePay, they appear to come from the platform.

[chadwhitacre]

If you are interested in integrating WePay Clear with your site, contact our sales team who will review your needs and make a detailed implementation guide available.

[Changaco]

Obviously I had looked at WePay Clear, and as I said it doesn't let us handle all user interactions.

I don't see evidence that WePay has any i18n, and if they don't have the underlying architecture it could take a while for them to implement it.

Finally, WePay is still US-only for payouts.

[chadwhitacre]

Finally, WePay is still US-only for payouts.

I saw that they have a Canada beta, but certainly they don't have the reach of Stripe or Braintree.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#192 (comment)

[chadwhitacre]

Over on #67 we've ended up going with a piecemeal solution, with Braintree for payins, and PayPal/Zipmark (hopefully; #3491) for payouts.