Payment gateway is always an important question for merchants that run eCommerce businesses. By default, you might want to take PayPal as your payment gateway. However, there are so many new breakthroughs in the payment industry that PayPal has failed to catch up on. In addition a new player, Stripe, is positioning themselves as a top player in the payment gateway scene. Here are the reasons why you should use Stripe:
Table of Contents
Easy testing
Merchants can easily test transactions with their real account just by clicking on the test button, whereas with other payment gateways such as Paypal, you have to register for a sandbox account. Switching back and forth between a sandbox and live account might not be convenient, and you might be confused in the process.
No merchant account needed
If you run a business, you need to contact your bank to create a merchant account to receive money from customers. Stripe is different. Since it is a merchant account aggregator, you just need to sign up for a Stripe account to receive payment right away.
Clear pricing scheme
Stripe offers a clear pricing policy: 2.9% plus 30c (for US cards), and 1.4% plus 20p (European cards) and 2.9% plus 20p (non-European cards). Paypal charges their customers higher fees, and has additional service fees. Meanwhile, Stripe pricing is much clearer with an upfront cost, and most of additional services are free of charge.
Stripe offers a transaction-based pricing model variable cost structure, which helps merchants a lot if they just start their business with no customers or revenue.
Payment security
This is a must have for any payment gateway, as we are talking money here. Stripe offers you various card data collection method for merchants, namely Element, Express checkout, and Stripe.js
Stripe.js
Allows you to put a payment form on your website without storing customer payment detail on your server. All payment info will be sent directly to Stripe’s server as well. This helps customer to maintain a consistent shopping experience while still keep customer info secured.
Support for Subscription Planning. Many businesses now use subscription as their business model or as a tool for gaining competitive advantage.
All of these methods allow customers’ payment info to be sent directly to Stripe instead of being transferred to merchant server. Therefore, Stripe offers you several benefits:
- Lower your PCI Compliance scope since customer payment data is stored and process by Stripe and on Stripe’s server. No sensitive card data touches the merchant’s server.
- Improved security as any security breach that happens to your server won’t affect customer card data.
3D Secure
With this function, customers making payment will answer an additional question that only they know the answer to in another security page. This ensures that hackers cannot steal all card information from customers and make payment from stolen cards.
- Saved card
With saved card, customers only have to fill in their card details once and everything will be on autopilot. You don’t want to break your customers’ fingers right?
- Tokenization
With tokenization, customer card info will become a one-time use token that prevents hackers from using them for making purchase.
Customizable design
One weakness that host payment gateways have is that you cannot customize the appearance of the destination page. This might cause confusion to customer and interrupt their shopping experience. With Stripe Element, merchants have the capability to customize and decorate their payment form to create a consistent branding experience for their customers
Mobile payment
More and more customers are making payment online with their smart devices. A friendly payment gateway should support mobile payment by default. Luckily, Stripe has supported integration with Apple Pay, which is increasing popular for smartphone users.
Smart fraud protection
Stripe , as a payment gateway, uses a smart payment filter toolkit called radar. By using Machine learning, Stripe can recognize unusual payment patterns and block them to protect you from frauds and chargebacks.
Who should use Stripe?
If you are a new startup or eCommerce business that wants to choose a fully functional payment gateway with various benefits and high security without the need, then Stripe is what you need for the right payment gateway. If you are an existing business that has established relationships with traditional partners, then you keep using your old payment gateways. However, Stripe is enjoy strong growth so your partners might switch to it in the future, so be alert cause they can happen anytime.
Please create a Stripe account and start using the emerging payment gateway.
Magenest offer Stripe Integration service for Magento 2 customers.
