For some reason, Stripe is the No #1 Online Payment Platform for Internet Businesses. It’s Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company. Dual-headquartered in San Francisco, California, and Dublin, Ireland.
Primarily, the company offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces. Especially for e-commerce websites and mobile applications. The reason why Stripe uses SaaS is that it’s a method of software delivery and licensing.
To enumerate, SaaS is a method in which software is accessed online through a subscription. Rather than bought and installed on individual computers. That’s why many online payment platforms prefer using it mostly too. But, what is Stripe really, and how does it work?
What Is Stripe?
Stripe is a payments infrastructure for the internet that millions of businesses of all sizes – from startups to Fortune 500s – use. Its web-based software and APIs allow users to accept payments, send payouts, and manage their online businesses easily.
Stripe takes the all-important eCommerce principle of reducing friction to the extreme. Allowing you to create and start playing around with their account dashboard without any risk or waiting. It’s also attached to big users like Instacart, Salesforce, Amazon, Slack, Shopify, Google, Lyft, Zoom, etc.
For ambitious companies around the world, Stripe makes moving money as simple, borderless, and programmable as the rest of the internet. Their teams are based in dozens of offices around the world. And they process hundreds of billions of dollars each year for startups to Fortune 500s.
How Stripe Works
Perhaps, it takes a few more than 5 seconds to begin collecting that first Stripe payment. But, you can have a test account dashboard all of your own with signup that literally takes seconds. Even your email and password are not required to have access to a Stripe dashboard and start poking around.
Stripe takes the all-important eCommerce principle of reducing friction to the extreme. Whilst, allowing you to create and start playing around with their account dashboard without any risk or waiting. Below is a beginners tutorial video on how it works:
In order to finalize your account you just need to provide the following. An email address, phone number, business address, and a bank account to link for transfers. And then, you can start taking payments with Stripe right away.
Within a week or two, a friendly Stripe employee will verify your account and possibly email you with some requests to complete your account creation. In keeping with their principle of simplicity and convenience, pricing is 2.9% + $.30 per successful transaction.
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Fortunately, when it comes to integration, Stripe has broad support among all the major eCommerce platforms (including almost every WordPress platform). So integrating it with your cart software is generally as simple as copying and pasting in your secret keys found in your Stripe dashboard.
On one side, if you’re a developer you’ll find the extremely readable documentation and code samples make taking credit card payments easier than you might expect. On the other hand, if you just need a simple and quick way to safely collect credit card details for charging, later on, you can use Stripe Checkout too.
Find more reasons here:
- Patrick Rauland
- Chris Lema
- iThemes
- Spark Logix
With Stripe Checkout, you can even add an attractive credit card form popup. More so, that handles validation, error handling, and securely transmitting payment information to Stripe servers. We all know how chargebacks are an unfortunate reality of business.
As you might expect Stripe makes managing chargebacks frankly as painless as it can be. Especially, with a simple notification system and response interface. Making it easy to manage and contest undeserved chargebacks. Just be sure to keep good records and save those server logs!
Ready To Get Started?
And now, it’s time you visit their official website to get started right away. There’re is no time to wait or fall back in your business any longer. Now that it’s a unified platform and fully integrated suite of payments products. You can start with payments first.
In that case, explore their payments, or create an account instantly and start accepting payments. You can also use their Contact to let their team design a custom package for your business. All in all, get up and running with Stripe in as little as 10 minutes.
Other use cases include:
Likewise, you’ll always know what you pay since they’ve got integrated per-transaction pricing with no hidden fees. And as such, you can see their Pricing details for more.
Below are its overall benefits:
Global-scale: It’s the backbone for internet business. With more than 135 currencies and payment methods supported. Almost 90% of U.S. adults have bought from businesses using Stripe.
Close to the metal: From direct integrations with card networks and banks to checkout flows in the browser, they operate on and optimize at every level of the financial stack.
Fastest-improving platform: They release hundreds of features and improvements each year to help you stay ahead of industry shifts. (On average, they deploy their production API 16x per day).
Battle-tested reliability: Their systems operate with 99.9%+ uptime and are highly scalable and redundant. Stripe is certified to the highest compliance standards.
Intelligent optimizations: Their machine learning models train on billions of data points and help increase revenue across conversion, fraud, revenue recovery, and more.
In addition, their web-based payment platform gets more than 250M API requests per day. Not forgetting, peaking at more than 13K requests a second. As well as more than 35 countries with local acquiring, optimizing acceptance rates.
Lastly, to enroll in the Medium Partner Program and receive payouts from Medium, you will need to create a free Stripe account. That said, in this article, you’ll learn more about setting up Medium payouts with Stripe.
Final Words,
Finally, we now live in an era where you can sell almost anything online, from real GoFast Jetpack to Han Solo phone covers. Regardless of how crazy some ideas may seem, selling online is not as simple as setting up shop. And slapping the virtual “Open” sign on the door.
Technically, if you’re going to create an online store and accept virtual (card not present) payments, you have to have the capability and security to do so. See the SSL article for more detail on security. In a place where Bitcoin is more common than cash, this can be as confusing as an LA freeway.
A majority of payment processors don’t exactly make this process any easier. Some include numerous features like merchant accounts. While some require extra fees to set up a merchant account. In that case, pricing structures are inconsistent, and the features each payment solution offers can vary.
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Basically, online stores must abide by some of the same rules as brick-and-mortar stores. Your store has to have a merchant account to process credit card payments. But, your merchant account has nothing to do with the way that you accept payments.
In reality, it’s your “bank account” for accepting credit card purchases. To simply put, it involves an agreement between you and the credit card company establishing your ability to accept payments and the fees associated with doing so.
Equally important, the money involved in a payment transfer is held in your merchant account until it’s transferred to your bank account. That’s why, by all means, you should consider selecting a Payment Processor such as Stripe. And, having said that, you can read and learn more about How to Select a Payment Processor in detail.