In my previous company's e-commerce platform, I struggled with one of the most frustrating platform restrictions out there: countries that refuse to play nice with Stripe. As a frontend engineer, I've had my fair share of battles with payment gateways, but this particular battle had me questioning whether I should just build my own payment processor from scratch.
The Problem We Were Actually Solving
We were trying to sell digital products to customers in a handful of countries that either didn't accept Stripe or had a plethora of caveats that made using Stripe a losing proposition. To say that PayPal was an option would be a lie – it was flat-out blocked in some of these countries. Our customers were confused, and frankly so was I. Our payment gateway options were limited, and we were starting to feel like our product was being held hostage by these countries' restrictive policies.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
Initially, we settled on using crypto as a payment gateway. We liked the idea of offering crypto payments as an alternative, and we thought it would solve our problem. We integrated a crypto payment processor, which was a beast of its own, but it seemed like a viable solution. However, we soon realized that this wasn't the magic solution we had hoped for. Not only was the crypto integration expensive and complex, but we also had to deal with the regulatory nightmare that came with handling crypto payments.
