Stripe is a payment gateway that allows us to accept transactions for our online business and therefore charge for our products or services offered.

It is a very technological company, currently with more than 250 million requests to its API daily and already accepting more than 135 currencies and different payment methods.

The classic comparison that comes to mind when we think of this type of tool is PayPal, perhaps the best known and most widespread in the digital world.

What can Stripe offer me? The following article is dedicated to the Stripe payment gateway and in the future we can make a more exhaustive comparison with its main competitor PayPal.

Advantages of using Stripe Why use it?

Once the presentations are made, let’s see what advantages using stripe forms has compared to other similar payment gateways:

1. – Signing up is free

One of the main advantages of Stripe is that you do not have to pay for registration within the platform. Creating an account is totally free and in a matter of minutes we can have everything linked to our online store.

As usual, a commission is paid on each sale, but this is much lower than some of its main competitors, we will discuss that later. 

2. – Flexibility and Versatility

We are talking about a gateway that accepts more than 135 different currencies and payment methods. Accepting all types of bank cards and also payments from mobile applications.

Stripe also works very well with recurring payments, that is, those ecommerce that need to manage successive payments as in a membership site.

It has an autocomplete for checkout; this means that it is able to safely store user data to make future payments. In this regard, our online store does not need to be aware of security or data encryption. Stripe is in charge.

3. – Stripe Commissions

We go to the high point of the matter, the sales commissions. Unlike what we are used to seeing in this type of payment gateways, Stripe has very low commissions, we are talking about 1.4% + € 0.25 for European cards and 2.9% + € 0.25 for non-European cards of the total amount of the sale.

On the contrary, in PayPal we find a rate for national transactions (Spain) of 2.9% + € 0.35, which can amount to 4.9% of the total purchase for international orders. As you can see, a considerable difference.

4. – Integration

One of the main drawbacks that other similar payment systems have had was the redirection when making the payment. Stripe was clear from the first moment that the payment process should be possible from the domain of our store itself and in this way the visitor would not suffer any redirection.

For this, Stripe has total flexibility when it comes to making it fit in harmony with the aesthetics of our website, preventing it from clashing with the rest of the elements of the payment process.

The rest of the gateways had to imitate this great step taken by Stripe and currently also offer alternatives for this complete integration, however at a reasonable price.

5. – Possibility of creating an External Checkout

Like Paypal, we can also generate a specific link to be able to charge for our products. This functionality is very useful when, for example, we want to send our client the payment by Email or WhatsApp for a specific product.

However, Stripe goes much further, offering the possibility of generating an external Checkout in a totally separate url that we can share.

Importance of payment methods in E-commerce

The payment process is a critical point in the conversion phase within our online store. A good practice is to offer the user the possibility to choose how they prefer to carry out the transaction of their order.

Whenever our company policy allows it, we should make more traditional payment methods available to the client, such as bank transfer or cash on delivery. These two methods work quite well in customer service with people of advanced age or little introduced to the world of Internet shopping.

At the opposite pole, we find more millennial payment methods such as payment through Bizum and in the not too distant future the possibility of WhatsApp Pay. Its arrival in Spain was expected in 2020 but is currently in beta in some countries before landing here.

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