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Ask HN: How to get revenue from card merchant fees?

3 points by alexmingoia ↗ HN
I came across a business that offers free service by issuing a card to their customers and earning 1% on merchant fees when the customer uses the card to buy things. They appear to be using Stripe to do this, since that's what their ToS says. But I couldn't find anything about customizable merchant fees on Stripe's website.

How do these merchant fees work? And is this something possible via Stripe?

8 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] thread
dang
Someone asked me whether our software had taken the word "Stripe" out of the title here. The answer is no - the submitted title was originally "Ask HN: Stripe-issued card merchant fees?", but the submitter later edited it. Our software doesn't take the word "Stripe" out of any titles, or do anything like that to titles. It does take out common linkbait patterns (and sometimes screws that up), but there aren't any proper names in those rules, nor anything YC related.
alexmingoia
I took “Stripe” out because it wouldn’t appear in “Ask HN”. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on, since it appeared everywhere else. On a hunch, I figured maybe HN was silently excluding “Stripe” from Ask HN. As soon as I removed it from the title the submission showed up. To confirm, I also tested the same issue yesterday with another submission to the same effect. With “Stripe” in the title it wouldn’t appear in the “Ask HN” section, when I edited it out it showed up.

I deleted my question because I didn’t want to start drama. But since you responded anyway, I will ask: What is the explanation for the above behavior?

dang
That had nothing to do with the title. There's a small points threshold before a submission makes it from /newest to /ask. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.) Someone happened to upvote the post not long after you edited the title.
alexmingoia
So why are there posts that have 1 point and no comments in "Ask HN"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30140909

I had specifically tested this with a post the other day, and deleted it as soon as I saw editing the title made it show up. It had only 1 point, no upvotes. I will not press the issue further. It doesn't matter.

dang
Ah, you're right - it's more complicated than I thought. The code that generates /ask doesn't exclude 1-point stories (so the point about there being a threshold isn't strictly accurate). However, it only considers the top 1500 stories in overall ranking. Stories with 1 point soon fall out of the top 1500. What this means is that a story with 1 point may show up on /ask for a little while (most likely just a few seconds), and then will disappear from /ask, unless and until it gets more upvotes. That's why so many of the posts on https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew don't show up on https://news.ycombinator.com/ask. It definitely doesn't have to do with title edits, though.
tdhoot
Disclaimer: I work at Stripe, but not on the team(s) responsible for this.

You can use Stripe Issuing (https://stripe.com/issuing) to issue virtual or physical cards. If you have a large transaction volume or a unique business model, you can Contact Sales from that page to discuss "interchange revenue sharing", which seems to be what you're describing.

If you want to learn more about Interchange, check out this guide: https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-online-payments#co...

alexmingoia
Thanks for your response. I’m just kind of blown away by the possibilities of such a revenue model and have never heard it talked about before. I had no idea it was possible to get a cut of the merchant fees.

One of my competitors is doing this. They offer their service free by issuing a card to the customer, and make money on interchange fees whenever the customer uses the card.