Balanced has a ridiculously huge advantage in the next-day payouts (same-day to WF bank accounts!), like Square offers. However, Stripe is far better supported by third-party clients for shopping carts.
It's really unfortunate that we have a fractured payment processing market where overlapping them doesn't solve the problem. For example:
Square: Best in-person payment processor. Next day payments if taken before 5 PM PST. Does card-not-present transactions as well. For some insane reason, does not have web access or an API despite being around longer than Stripe and Balanced.
Stripe: Best integration with wp-commerce, third party plugins, etc. Excellent interface. Rapid prototyping and feature rollout. Cons: 7 day rolling payments are slower than Square, Balanced, and Paypal.
Balanced: Fastest payments. Terrible third-party support. Documentation not nearly as good as Stripe, interface is slightly confusing.
I use Stripe for my ecommerce business and Square for in-person transactions, but I desperately want to switch to Balanced because of cashflow improvements. But that's not going to happen until third-party plugin support is vastly improved (I've already opened tickets on this months ago in their tracker with no response). Or I'd switch to Square if they decided they wanted an additional $XXX million dollars in business and offered a web API (what is the reason for NOT having this).
Annoying, but considering where we were just a few years ago, I'll take it.
It's really unfortunate that we have a fractured payment processing market where overlapping them doesn't solve the problem. For example:
Square: Best in-person payment processor. Next day payments if taken before 5 PM PST. Does card-not-present transactions as well. For some insane reason, does not have web access or an API despite being around longer than Stripe and Balanced.
Stripe: Best integration with wp-commerce, third party plugins, etc. Excellent interface. Rapid prototyping and feature rollout. Cons: 7 day rolling payments are slower than Square, Balanced, and Paypal.
Balanced: Fastest payments. Terrible third-party support. Documentation not nearly as good as Stripe, interface is slightly confusing.
I use Stripe for my ecommerce business and Square for in-person transactions, but I desperately want to switch to Balanced because of cashflow improvements. But that's not going to happen until third-party plugin support is vastly improved (I've already opened tickets on this months ago in their tracker with no response). Or I'd switch to Square if they decided they wanted an additional $XXX million dollars in business and offered a web API (what is the reason for NOT having this).
Annoying, but considering where we were just a few years ago, I'll take it.