Intro

Stripe is an internationally successful payment solution that gives you the tools to add payments to your website or take them in-person. It also provides a wide range of other merchant services to help your business avoid fraud, set up subscriptions, and calculate and collect taxes, among other things. Although it may need minor coding knowledge to set up, they have tutorials on how to set up. The level of customization available makes Stripe a great choice for many businesses.

Stripe in Brief

Monthly fee: None

Per swipe fee: 2.9% + 30¢

Setup fee: None

Cancellation fee: None

PCI compliance fee: No separate PCI compliance fee

Best for: Businesses with coding expertise who want full customization

Terminals

Stripe doesn’t offer its own physical terminals, but it can provide you with a powerful software solution for building your own point of sale with third-party terminals. Known as Stripe Terminal, this collection of SDKs (software development kits) enables you to process payments in physical business locations, whether that’s a restaurant, store, or another retail opportunity.

Seamless integration between Terminal and Stripe’s other services means you get the full advantages of Stripe’s suite of features, including Connect, which allows you to accept payments. You can also set up in-store subscriptions with the Billing module.

Stripe Terminal can be used on a range of devices, which you can purchase for a 1-time fee. These include:

POS solutions

Stripe’s payment processing platform accepts a wide range of payment methods and directly integrates with major card networks and banks. If you want to add Stripe to your ecommerce store as well as in-person, you can take global payments from international card networks and add a dynamic checkout to your page.

With Stripe Terminal and the Stripe platform, you can manage your online (e.g., on your website) and offline (i.e., via a physical terminal) payments in one place. Because you’ll be building your own system using the Stripe SDK, you have more flexibility over how things work, and can provide a similar experience across all sales channels, like allowing customers to reserve an item online and pick it up in-store. Finally, Stripe comes with built-in fleet management, for managing all your physical and virtual points of sale, including ordering new hardware, configuring readers remotely, and monitoring device status.

You will need a software development kit (SDK) to integrate your point of sale (POS) software with the hardware you’ve chosen and Stripe’s payment processing API. This makes Stripe a bit more complicated to set up than other “out of the box” solutions, but if you’ve got some coding knowledge (or a team member who does), it allows for greater flexibility to customize your in-person sales processes.

Merchant Services

Stripe offers a range of other useful merchant services to complement its payment solutions. These include the following:

• Fraud prevention: Stripe uses machine learning to detect and block fraud for any type of business, without causing problems for legitimate customers.
• Sigma: a data-analysis module that uses SQL to generate custom reports using your sales data.
• Atlas: a startup incorporation service that takes care of the paperwork and legal aspects of starting a business.
• Climate: directs a portion of your revenue towards carbon-removal technologies.
• Tax: automatically calculate and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST, and create the reports you will need for tax filing.
• Identity: Stripe can help you verify identities to reduce the risk of fraud.
• Revenue recognition: quickly and simply put together revenue reports for accurate and fast accounting.
• Stripe’s service is continuously updated with new features.
• Machine learning solutions draw on data from Stripe’s huge customer base to make its fraud prevention and revenue optimizing features even more effective.

Pricing

Stripe has a clear pricing structure with no hidden fees and no monthly subscription. Its main package is charged at 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge. Included in this price are over 100 of Stripe’s payment-processing and other business services. If you are processing payments in-person, this becomes 2.7% + 5¢.

Some additional services incur costs, including the following.

You will also need to pay extra to purchase the hardware for in-person payments.

Applying and Contracts

To get started with Stripe, you will need to register on the site and use the pointers to work out what kind of integration you need to build. You can test your API as you go and toggle between using Stripe’s test data (for testing connections and workflows) and your account details, for when you’re ready to go live.

You will need to add your bank details to enable payouts, the first of which can take anywhere from seven to 14 days to arrive in your bank account (subsequent payments occur according to Stripe’s payout schedule, which varies by country). You will also need to verify your tax details and identity (using your date of birth and Social Security number).

About Stripe

Stripe was founded in California in 2009 by Patrick and John Collison and remains a private company. It is now an internationally successful payment processing company with over $7 billion in revenue as of 2020. The Better Business Bureau (BBB) gives Stripe an A+ rating, although the average score from 129 reviews is 1.04/5.

Customer Support

The Stripe website has a lot of useful information, including a rich knowledge hub. For further support, you can contact the support team 24/7 through your Stripe account. You can also chat with other developers on Discord if you need help with Stripe’s API.

Summary

Stripe is an internationally successful payment processing platform. You can take payments online or in-person using the multifaceted and customizable Stripe platform. Plus, you can add on a whole host of other useful services to help your business avoid fraud, calculate and collect taxes, and verify identities, among many other things.

With transparent pricing and no hidden fees, Stripe makes it easy to see how it might fit into your budget. Although you will need some coding expertise to get your Stripe platform set up, and there’s no easy “out of the box” solution for POS, if your business is looking for a solution that can be fully customized and expanded alongside your revenue, Stripe is worth a look.