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Why Are We Using Stripe As a Primary Payment Solution?

Why Are We Using Stripe As a Primary Payment Solution?

By Mariana Demchuk, Kostya Zgara | November 30, 2022 | Web Development

It was difficult to imagine a few decades ago that you could send money to any country in the world with just a few clicks. Today, payment system integration is required for every online business. And the choice of payment platform affects transaction frequency and company profitability.

Stripe is a relatively new online payment service based on a cloud platform. However, it quickly gained a lot of users due to its advantages for companies of all sizes. In this article, we will look at the features of this payment system and explain what exactly makes Stripe the best payment solution for businesses.

Introduction to the Stripe Payment System

Stripe is a powerful payment system that allows you to accept and make payments through websites and helps you manage your business online. The company was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collins.

Stripe overview

Stripe handles all card payment issues, including card storage, recurring payments, and bank statements. The system is characterized by the high speed of payment processing and security and, from the point of view of business, a very convenient means of integration with sites (especially for programmers).

Companies of all sizes work with Stripe, from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations. Stripe customers include Google, Zoom, Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, and others.

Stripe Payments Statistics & Numbers

Stripe is widely trusted by businesses, and the statistics show it best. The service processes more than 250 million requests per day — about 13 thousand requests per second. Stripe supports over 135 currencies and payment methods, and 90% of American adults shop online through Stripe. In 2021 alone, the company processed payments totaling more than $640 billion. Check out some more numbers:

  • Stripe is now valued at $94.4 billion (up nearly 3x since April 2020).
  • Currently, 3.1 million active websites use Stripe.
  • According to BuiltWith data, 3,124,751 live websites accept payments on their site using Stripe.
  • Stripe is available for businesses in 47 countries
  • According to the Stripe CEO, 20,000 companies have been incorporated using Stripe Atlas, generating over $3 billion in revenue.
  • Stripe has 2 million customers worldwide.
  • Stripe Capital helped businesses to grow 114% faster compared to their peers
  • Elon Musk was among the early investors in Stripe during a seed round in 2011.

What is Stripe Payment Offer: Key Products and Services

Stripe offers a wide range of connected products, from simple mobile payments to various financial services. This makes it useful for businesses of any size.

Stripe products

Stripe Payment

Stripe Payment provides a wide range of accepted payment methods. From debit cards to credit cards, you should have no problems with this payment processing company. There are over 135 currencies in which you can accept money, and in addition to some pretty interesting international payment solutions, you also get many popular payment methods for your Stripe account, such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, Alipay, and Visa Checkout.

Moreover, Stripe Payment allows customers to pay quickly and conveniently, offers low transaction fees, and is PCI Level 1 certified. The last point makes money transfers through Stripe the most secure, which is a priority for customers using online payments.

Stripe Checkout

Stripe Checkout allows you to change settings on the checkout page, thereby providing customers with maximum convenience when making any purchases (one-time and subscription), as well as optimizing the process of accepting local and international payments, while guaranteeing prompt loading of the page, adapting to all devices, and being multilingual.

Stripe Tax

Stripe Tax

Internet businesses are required to collect taxes and staying compliant can be challenging, especially as your business grows and have many locations. Tax rules and rates change constantly and vary based on what and where you sell. If you ignore these complexities, you risk paying penalties and interest on top of uncollected taxes.

The Stripe Tax service was developed to make tax compliance simpler so that business owners may concentrate on growing their enterprises. In more than 35 countries and all US states, Stripe Tax is optimized for tax calculation. In Europe, the service enables both country and VAT OSS registrations, while in Canada, it offers both country and provincial registrations.

With one line of code or a single click, Stripe Tax enables you to compute and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST. With Stripe Tax you automatically collect the right amount of tax and access the reports you need to file returns.

Stripe Elements

Stripe's UI building blocks help to design a secure payment experience that perfectly matches your site and helps drive conversion. Payment Elements comes with masking, styling, error handling, and client-side input validation for card acceptance. It also supports 20 payment methods without additional integration and dynamically shows the payment methods most likely to improve conversion.

Using the Payment links, you can create payment links to sell products or services, subscribe, or collect donations. Links can be posted on social networks, and sent to customers in messages or emails. In addition, the Stripe dashboard will help you keep track of unpaid invoices and receive payment notifications.

Stripe Radar

Stripe Radar

Radar is a machine-learning anti-fraud system with 3D Secure technology designed to prevent fraud. It provides maximum protection for transactions, equipment, and accounts and allows you to set the acceptable risk of payment.

The system uses hundreds of filters to process each payment and constantly analyzes data from billions of transactions passing through the Stripe payment system around the world to accurately predict the likelihood of fraud.

Stripe Connect

Stripe Connect offers tokenization of card data to ensure PCI compliance and performs risk-based verification to maintain compliance with local payment and network regulations. It also helps with additional identity verification to address unique risks and compliance requirements.

Stripe Connect helps build pre-built, conversion-optimized user interfaces with optimized payment compliance plans for internal users and manages the complexities of global compliance. It also offers global payments, increases conversion and modernizes the payment stack, etc.

Stripe Billing Stripe

Stripe's billing functionality is especially useful for businesses that work on a subscription model, as it allows you to implement various pricing structures (one-time, recurring, tiered) and customize and adjust the payment collection process (relevant for sellers who regularly run advertising and promotions).

Stripe Billing offers billing tools in two plans:

  • "Starter" - charges 0.5% for paid recurring payments and includes automatic collection and customer portal tools;
  • "Scalable" - assumes a cost of 0.8% for recurring payments and the addition of tools for creating estimates and NetSuite integration (via Stripe Connector) on top of the "Starter" plan.

Stripe Invoicing

Stripe Invoicing

Invoicing is a convenient invoicing tool: it can be either a manually created invoice or an API to add more advanced settings (such as automatic email reminders for expired payments). With invoicing, you can receive one-time or recurring payments and set tax rates directly on your invoices.

Stripe Terminal

Stripe Terminal helps build personalized checkout to accept payments in the real world. Built with platforms and modern retailers in mind, Terminal helps businesses merge their online and offline channels with flexible developer tools, pre-certified card readers, and cloud-based hardware management.

Terminal works with Connect to provide a unified payments stack with a single onboarding process, helping you unlock new revenue streams from in-person sales.

Stripe Financial Connections

With Stripe Financial Connections users can securely share their financial information with you. This streamlines common payment processes and helps manage finances.

Stripe Financial Connections allows connecting instantly to over 90% of US bank accounts and retrieving authorized data from a broad set of 5,000 financial institutions. Such integration helps speed payments, lower fraud, and underwriting risks, and create new solutions.

In addition, Financial Connections is fully compatible with other Stripe services, so it's easy to connect for payment experience improvements.

Stripe Identity

Stripe Identity allows confident verification of the authenticity of ID documents from over 100 countries. Users get full control over who their data is shared with and can limit sensitive data access with restricted API keys.

Stripe Atlas

The Stripe Atlas helps to create a company in Delaware, US, from anywhere in the world. The service also includes the preparation and signing of the company's internal documents and documents protecting its intellectual property, the company's registration as a taxpayer, etc. With the Stripe Atlas service, C corporations and LLCs can be created without lengthy paperwork, legal complexity, and numerous fees in a short period.

Stripe vs PayPal - Which One To Choose?

There are many payment systems on the market, such as Braintree, Paddle, Square, Authorize.net and others. However, PayPal and Stripe have gained high trust among customers and are the leading online payment platforms today. So, PayPal or Stripe - which is better for your business?

PayPal has more than 250 million registered accounts and is used by more than 20 million merchants, making it one of the most popular e-commerce tools. PayPal dominated online commerce for a long time until Stripe appeared.

PayPal platform provides a wide range of user-friendly online and offline payment options. PayPal's payment processing rates range from 1.9% to 3.5% of each transaction, plus a fixed fee ranging from 5 cents to 49 cents. The exact amount you pay depends on which PayPal product you use. A $100 transaction will cost between $2 and $3.99.

However, it can take up to three days to receive your funds. Also, PayPal has poor customer service that can be hard to reach.

But one of the biggest disadvantages of using PayPal is that your account can be frozen without warning, which can be disastrous for your business. PayPal’s algorithm can sometimes detect suspicious behaviors in your account. And when that happens, PayPal can automatically freeze your account, along with the funds in it.

PayPal vs Stripe

Stripe has a very high reputation in the world of online business, primarily due to high reliability and security, as well as good documentation and ease of integration with sites.

Stripe is the leader in the number of advantages among all payment systems. Stripe meets international security standards, with Level 1 PCI certification. This is the highest level of certification available in the payments industry.

Stripe handles all payment card issues, including card data storage, recurring payments, and bank withdrawals. Moreover, Stripe's fee for swipe and chip transactions starts at 2.9% plus 9 cents per transaction while PayPal's is 2.29% plus 49 cents. The fee for keyed transactions for PayPal is higher, starting at 3.49% plus 9 cents while Stripe's fee does not change.

Why Stripe Is the Best Payment Solution For Businesses?

As you can see Stripe offers a wide range of functions that make it an excellent payment solution for any business. Among other things, this is a fixed price for system services, convenient and detailed reporting capabilities, orientation to international markets, constant improvement of functionality, advanced settings, and much more. So let's look closer at the main advantages of Stripe for business.

Wide Range of Payment Methods

The Stripe payment system supports over 135 currencies. You can use Stripe to accept payments from all over the world with various bank cards, including Visa and MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and a few other foreign credit cards, and mobile wallets like Google and Apple Pay.’

In addition, it integrates with almost all existing commercial applications. Stripe works and optimizes all levels of financial flow, from direct integration with card networks and banks to payments through a browser plugin. The platform directly connects to Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and China UnionPay in global markets.

High Productivity

Stripe offers a wide range of services and products to increase your business productivity. For example, Stripe Atlas makes it easy to launch an international business, and Stripe Sigma is a simple but multifunctional reporting management tool. Moreover, a robust API provides easy integration with other platforms and good efficiency across different devices, helping your customers pay hassle-free no matter how they choose to do it.

Advanced Features For Developers

Stripe provides a special panel designed for experienced developers - it contains about 450 development tools. For example, Stripe provides out-of-the-box integrations with various CRM systems, platforms for creating websites and online stores, analytics systems, customer support services, EPR, etc.

The system already has an extensive library of ready-made solutions and options. In particular, Stripe's client and server libraries are available for such programming languages, as React, PHP,.NET, and iOS.

But take note that setting up Stripe requires programming experience. There will be no problems with basic settings, but more complex processes will require help, and Seedium experts are ready to help you connect.

Data security

With a full suite of both basic and advanced security features, Stripe is one of the most secure payment gateways you can use. Every Stripe account comes with the following security features:

  • Address Verification Service (AVS)
  • CVV / CVV2
  • HTTPS verification using TLS (SSL) encryption

As we mentioned above, Stripe is a PCI Level 1 Certified Service Provider, which means it meets the most stringent standards set by the PCI Security Standards Council. This makes money transfers through Stripe the most secure, which is a priority for customers using online payments.

Pricing

Stripe has an integrated pricing structure. It gives you access to a complete payment platform and also offers pay-as-you-go rates, according to its website. This means US costs are 2.9% + 30 cents for every successful card charge. Also, if you're a business owner who has to deal with a lot of high-volume transactions, Stripe recommends you contact them to get a more personalized deal.

Conclusion

Stripe is a powerful and smart payment system with great performance for both businesses and customers. Stripe exceeds industry security standards and is trusted by thousands of companies of all sizes around the world, including many Fortune 500 companies.

Considering all the advantages and the impressive list of possible integrations, we believe that Stripe is the best payment solution for connecting to a website or an app.

\ If your business needs a reliable and secure online payment option, our professional team can help to connect Stripe to your web product and consult on all issues. Thus, your business will be provided with fast and secure payment reception from all over the world, and entry into the international market will take place in a short time.