There are many different ways to pay your way online these days. While one of the most well-known ones is PayPal, there are a number of different alternatives that may be useful, depending on what your business needs are.
Let’s take a look at one of these payment services and give them a review.
Products and Services of Stripe
Stripe, as a payment service, has some deceivingly simple features on offer. However, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover helpful tools you didn’t even know existed. Let’s check these out.
- Payment Processing: Stripe gives you immediate access to processing, similar to the likes of PayPal. Because it’s a third-party processing service, the company will approve your business almost immediately before checking you out more a bit down the line when you do more business. The downside to this is that it leads to more terminations than other traditional merchants.
- Developer Tools: this part of Stripe is usually what users are signing up for. The API is a considerably robust and well-connected framework. This means that developers can quickly implement the Stripe system using a variety of languages, e.g., Java. Overall, Stripe is a solid foundation upon which to grow your business.
- Stripe Checkout: Stripe’s checkout system allows you to host a checkout page without you having to build one in yourself. It’s as customized as you want it to be.
- Mobile Integration: naturally, you’ll want to have a part of your business where payments are made through smartphones. Stripe has this feature and provides a user-friendly payment system for smartphones and Android.
- Marketplace Solutions: Stripe offers you a vast range of tools that help you route your payments directly to your merchants, even allowing you to provide them with instant deposits.
- Subscription Options: Stripe has made it so that you have an unlimited number of plan options. This includes signing up a single user to multiple plant types, depending on personal preferences.
- Stripe Connect: Stripe connect is all about creating the right marketplace for your business. This includes conversion into over one hundred different currencies and verification of international sellers.
- Stripe Radar: this is Stripe’s answer to the fraud issue. Radar develops better learning against credit card fraud through adapting and building. It also allows you to set up specific rules around transactions on your dashboard, to increase the level of security depending on what you feel comfortable with.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Stripe
We’ve discussed the general output of products and services with Stripe. Now, let’s summarize the pros and cons.
Pros
- Support for Multi-Currency
- Excellent Standard of Subscription Tools
- Excellent Standard of Marketplace Tools
- Ideal for International Merchants
- Advanced Level of Reporting Tools
- Easy, Predictable Flat-Rate Pricing
- Excellent Standard for Developer Tools
Cons
- Stability Issues with Accounts
- No Phone Support
- Not Ideal for High-Risk Industries
What is Stripe? An Overview
There’s one thing for sure about Stripe, and that is that it’s a media darling. This is due to its hip, trending co-founders, its focus on a developer-first model, and offering flexible solutions to almost any kind of internet business.
This isn’t even to mention all of the famous online companies that Stripe now does business with (including Pinterest). However, does Stripe really live up to the bold statements, including wanting to change the way that the internet does business completely?
Stripe is a third-party payment service that, quite simply, wants to make it easy for companies to conduct online business. This means that it’s not just about processing credit card payments.
The biggest thing to take home from Stripes list of accolades is its developer features – they certainly stand out above the rest when it comes to a payment service.
Whether you’re looking for a way to implement subscription billing or a marketplace looking for an easy way to split the payments, Stripe has the features you need. This feature list is impressive, too, albeit slightly overwhelming if you’re not too familiar.
Needless to say, there’s a lot for you to love about Stripe. It’s easy to use, it’s powerful, and it’s filled to the brim with handy features.However, Stripe is not a payment service that’s going to suit everyone.This is because many of Stripe’s features are tailored more to larger corporations. While Stripe has powerful tools for marketplaces and eCommerce businesses, it also has tools for developers and global corporations.
At the end of the day, we don’t think that Stripe is a good option if you’ve got a small business. If you’re a small merchant that just wants to do it themselves or needs a quick solution to get up and running, you’re not going to find Stripe all that helpful.
This means that if you don’t have good developer skills and aren’t going to utilize everything that Stripe has to offer, it’s most likely going to be a waste of time for you.
While you are completely able to use Stripe to run online payments or even create some simple billing subscription options, this is barely tapping into what Stripe really has to offer. There are plenty of other alternatives that give these options at a great price – plus, you don’t need to be a developer to implement them.
Another reason to think long and hard about using Stripe is that they still experience the same problems that other third-party processors do, like PayPal. These include terminations, spotty customer service and common account holds.
If Stripe could work on stabilizing your account and improving their overall customer service, they would get a very high rating.
When it all comes down to it, Stripe is a great option if you are really planning on using all of the impressive features that Stripe offers. They even have a no monthly fee setup, which we love. However, if you’re not a developer and don’t plan on becoming one, there are plenty of other payment services out there who can do just as good of a job, for a little bit less.
Remember, there’s enough in the way of online payment services third parties for you to be spoiled for choice. What it really comes down to is what your business needs to make processing transactions as smooth as possible.
