13 April 2020
Stripe
Stripe is an online payment processing platform that allows businesses to send and receive payments over the internet. It is based in San Francisco, California.
Stripe was founded in 2010 by Irish entrepreneur brothers John Collison & Patrick Collison and was launched publicly in September 2011 after receiving a $2 million investment from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Stripe Payments makes it easier for merchants to start and control an online business by building a set of products that could save many hours, money, and resources that are required for creating and setting up an online payment processor to start accepting online payment from customers.
Stripe has some of the world’s best companies as their preferred payments processor such as Amazon, Shopify, Github, Yelp, Spotify, Uber, TED, Lyft, Reddit, and hundreds of top companies globally.
How does Stripe Works?
Stripe allows a business to take payments from credit cards in seconds and transfer those payments directly into the business bank accounts. Stripe supports credit card payments, recurring payments, subscription billing, Apple Pay, Ali Pay, and many other payment modes. Here’s the detailed breakdown of how Stripe works:
Sign Up - Stripe
The first thing you need to do as a merchant for receiving online or subscription payments from your customers is to sign up for a Stripe Merchant Account. Follow our step-by-step guide below on how to sign up and create Stripe Merchant Accounts.
STEP 1- Open https://stripe.com/.
STEP 2- Click on Start Now option.
STEP 3- Fill up all the required details and click on Create account.
STEP 4- Once you sign up, you need to verify the confirmation email. Open your email and confirm it.
STEP 5- Now, you need to activate your Stripe merchant account by adding your business details. Click on Start now.
STEP 6- The final details you need to submit to activate your Stripe merchant accounts are
• Business details
• Fulfillment details
• Credit card statement
• Bank details
• Two-step authentication
For more details on document verification, you can check this link, Required Verification Information.
Make sure you’ve got all the details correct. After submitting your details, you need to wait for 24 hours to activate your account. It could take longer than 24 hours in a few cases depending upon the verification process.
Accepting Payments on Stripe
Accepting credit cards or recurring payments on Stripe is as easy as making a new account. There are currently three ways by which you can accept payments on Stripe from your customers.
1. Creating an invoice on Stripe and sending it to your customers
2. Using third-party integration
3. Using Stripe Terminals
1. Creating an invoice on Stripe and sending it to your customers
Invoices are one of the easiest ways to collect credit card payments on Stripe, which includes the price, quantity, and taxes. Find out how to send invoices to your customers and receive payments.
STEP 1- Open create an invoice page
STEP 2- Choose Add new customer and fill out all the details such as name, email, and description
STEP 3- Click Add customer
STEP 4- Enter the product description and amount that you want to charge
STEP 5- Click Send Invoice
STEP 6- Verify the email address and click on Send Invoice Again option
2. Using third-party integration
In this process, you can choose a third-party integration platform to accept payments within your website or online store without any code.
You can use a third-party Stripe Subscription App like Payvoice and integrate with Stripe in minutes instead of weeks (without coding).
Features of Third-Party Stripe Payment Platform such as Payvoice: -
1. Create customizable and embeddable multi-plan subscription pages. 2. Allow your customers to manage their subscription plans without any coding. 3. Allow your users to get access to their Stripe customer profiles and manage their subscriptions themselves. 4. Let your team handle all the Stripe subscriptions in one place. 5. Add as many users as your team needs to manage your subscription plans. 6. Create A/B test with different pricing pages to verify what works best.
The benefit of creating invoicing service from third-party integration platforms is to ensure that you are processing payments efficiently and in a secure manner.
3. Use Terminal
With the help of Stripe Terminal, one can easily integrate Stripe payments into their existing POS (Point of Sale) in their native website or mobile apps. A Stripe Terminal deployment consists of four main components:
• Web-based or Mobile Apps • Backend • Stripe Terminal Reader • Stripe Terminal SDK
The SDK is available for JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, and Android Applications.
Stripe Accepted Cards
Stripe merchants can accept credit card payments from the customers worldwide using Sources – Integration path for creating payments. With Stripe, you can support almost any type of credit or debit cards. If you’re in the USA, you can accept payments from:
1. Visa
2. Master
3. Amex
4. Discover
5. JCB
6. Diners Club
7. Apple Pay
8. Google Pay
9. AliPay
10. China Union Pay
You can find all the supported cards and resources here, Card Payments with Sources
Stripe: Countries
Stripe is currently available for businesses in 39 countries. Here is the list of Stripe supported countries:
If your country is not supported, but you want to use Stripe, I’ll suggest opening a new bank account in the foreign country supported by Stripe.
Supported Currencies
Stripe now allows businesses from more than 135+ countries to process online payments. A company can charge foreign customers in their native currencies while receiving funds in theirs. Stripe allows you to present prices in a customer’s native currency. This can help you gain trust, boost sales, and it can directly help your customers avoid conversion costs. Check this link out to know more details on support currencies – Supported presentment currencies
Pricing & Fees
Stripe charges 2.9% + 30C per successful transactions, as long as you are doing under 1 million dollars in a year. One of the advantages of using Stripe is recurring charges, and refunds are free, unlike PayPal, where you need to pay $10 per month for the same.
Receipts
A receipt plays a critical part in helping a customer identify taxable and non-taxable income. After every successful transaction, Stripe sends an automatic email receipt to the customers. You can enable the feature in your email receipt settings.
Stripe Refund Policy
Stripe Refunds the entire amount that has been paid by the customers within 5-10 working days. You can refund either in whole or in part to your customers depending upon your understanding & agreements. Once the refund is issued, it cannot be cancelled.
Benefit of Stripe for Businesses
Choosing the right payment gateway for your online business can be tricky, especially if you’re in the subscription niche where you need to handle recurring payments, customer lifecycle management, PCI compliance, multiple gateways, dunning management, and many other things.
Stripe made it easier for many subscription businesses to set up subscription billing and receive recurring payments with documentation and the development docs. You may not realize how crucial the development docs are for a developer whose job is to integrate payment gateways using these docs to a website or app.
Stripe got a lot of love from developers because it was possible for tasks that should take three weeks to a month to be done in just two days. There are many other benefits of using Stripe for your business, such as:
1. Developer First- Stripe’s primary mission is to put the developer’s first, make it easier and flexible for programmers to integrate & process payments on their website. This comes with easy-to-use APIs, and excellent documentation.
2. Secure Transactions- Stripe security servers help to process the payments securely without the risk of leaking customer details.
3. Checkout Experience- Stripe provides a seamless checkout experience in your site that could lead to higher conversion rates and more sales. One of the significant benefits of using Stripe for your online e-commerce store or site is that it lets users stay on your site when making a payment, instead of being redirected to another website.
4. Easy to Integrate, Setup, and Maintain- You don’t need to know anything about coding to integrate Stripe on your website. A little bit of computer knowledge like copying and pasting things from one file to another can do the job.
5. PCI Compliant- Stripe helps to store credit card payments and cardholder data securely with a PCI-compliant hosting provider. You don’t have to worry about where to store data securely or how to find a PCI compliant payment gateway service provider.
6. Recurring Payments- Stripe is a much more powerful alternative when using it for your subscription business compared to any other subscription management platform. It allows you to set up recurring payments, trial periods with delayed payments, and offer customers discounts and coupons. It has one of the best payment reminder systems and tons of other incredible features.
7. International Payments- Stripe can process international payments in your customer’s native currency and save them conversion fees. Stripe is currently available in more than 39 countries, and you can accept more than 135 currencies.
Should I Use Stripe?
Absolutely! Stripe can handle thousands of transactions in a minute, and it supports various payment options for its consumers. It supports all debit cards and credit cards transactions globally and also supports many digital wallets such as Apple Pay and AliPay.
Stripe’s easy-to-use API allows developers to integrate it on their website and accept online payments. The credit card and ACH processing fees are also low in Stripe. Stripe can take care of making subscriptions, receiving payments, creating invoices, and features that can detect fraud.
