Finding the minimum chargeable amount

[mbu...@jestro.com]

Hi there,

We've been having trouble making charges on behalf of one of our users, as the amounts they're charging convert to an amount below Stripe's threshold:

Amount must convert to at least 50 cents. kr1.00 converts to approximately €0.13.

At the moment we've got an arbitrary minimum threshold of 100cents on a charge. In reality not many people will be charging that little, but it's a number that people will plug in so they can have a play around with the service. As the error is reported as an InvalidRequest error we don't display its message to the user, so they have no idea what's happened, and can't fix it themselves.

As the exchange rate is changing all the time it'd be helpful if we had some way to identify these problems at the time the user configures the product in our system, and at the time of purchase.

The configuration problem could be solved by providing an endpoint that accepts a currency and a set of variable(%)/fixed($) fees, and returns the minimum value that a charge can be. For example: Given that I will be charging customers in KR, and my application will charge a 7% fee, what's the minimum chargeable amount that Stripe will allow at today's exchange rate. We could then double this amount to give us a bit of flexibility.

Cheers,

Matt

[Michelle Bu]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the feedback! Having something like this would definitely
be very useful for folks dealing in more than one currency. While I
don't have any updates for you at the moment, improving our story here
is on our roadmap. In the meantime, you could look into using Open
Exchange Rates: https://openexchangerates.org/.

Michelle

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[mbu...@jestro.com]

Thanks Michelle, I didn't know about open exchange rates!

I forgot to add one other request to my opening email:

Would it be possible for you to add some extra metadata to invalid request errors that would help us differentiate this problem from other request errors? This'd allow us to identify these errors at the time of purchase, and display an appropriate message to the customer.

Matt

[pranith joe]

Are you saying Stripe uses https://openexchangerates.org/ for their exchange rate calculation?

[Thomas Chau]

@Michelle,

I second Matt's request :)

We currently have safeguards to either prevent the scenario from happening or to provide appropriate errors. (We simply prevented 0.50 orders). Now, however, it seems to be a dynamic number and it is hard to make it "safe". 

If this could be differentiated, we will be better able to provide our users specific feedback (and not the generic error, which leads them to think there is a serious system fault).

[Russell Davis]

Hi Matt,

Absolutely -- it's on our roadmap to add identifiers to our errors so they can be easily differentiated. Apologies that we don't already have them, but stay tuned!

Russell

[Russell Davis]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the feedback, and apologies for the trouble here. See my reply to Matt; we'll definitely be working on this!

Cheers,

Russell