Stripe is a payment service that has radically simplified business operations with foreign payments, and one of the most expensive start-ups in the world.

Today we will talk about the technical features, advantages, and differences of Stripe. And our colleague, Vladimir, practicing lead PHP Developer New Line Technologies will help us.

About the company

The company, which grew from seven lines of code to the most expensive private startup worth $95 billion, was founded in 2010 by brothers John and Patrick Collison from Ireland.

What is Stripe?

Stripe is an international system for secure internet payments. It is used by such well-known companies as Amazon, Google, GitHub, Samsung, Ford, and others.

The Stripe system acts as an intermediary between the buyer and the seller, which conducts a secure payment. The service works with individuals and large and small companies.

Stripe is an up-to-date solution for the automation of money transfers that works imperceptibly for the user.

How Does Stripe work?

Large and wide range of possibilities:

• Management and processing of electronic payments
• Interacting with digital wallets such as Alipay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, or giving customers the opportunity to pay by other means – bank debit or transfer (Visa, MasterCard, American Express cards)
• There are opportunities to make payments in installments (crediting)
• Pre-authorisation (freezing for 7 days) of funds for future payments
• Instant integration with any CMS
• Convenient payment window (without going to other pages and registration of your personal account) and opportunity to customize it
• Advanced antifrod system. Stripe Radar provides the opportunity to regulate the payment terms for buyers. Request 3DS, risk score. Also, Stripe is one of the first to enter Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)
• Instant reception and refund (withdrawals on fresh accounts 5-7 days, on heated accounts withdrawal 2 days)

The Stripe commission is 2.9% + 30 c per transaction. There is no fee for the registration of the account and connection to the site.

In addition to software for money transfer and credit processing, Stripe has other services: the ability to create its own online cashier to accept payments in physical stores, issuing cards, and services to prevent online fraud.

Online buyers always feel uncertain and distrustful – whether they are insured that their data will not fall into the hands of unscrupulous sellers or scammers who hack websites. Hence the question:

Can you trust Stripe? Is it safe to enter your personal data into the system?

Asked Vladimir:

“Yes! Stripe meets international safety standards, with first-level PCI certification. This is the highest level of certification available in the payment industry. All data is entered in the Stripe widget window, which is built into applications, transmitted by Stripe system in encrypted form (AES-256 block encryption algorithm is used).” Stripe has a very high reputation in the online business world, primarily due to its high reliability and security, as well as good documentation and easy integration with websites. Stripe exceeds industry safety standards and is trusted by thousands of companies of any size around the world, including many of the companies on the Fortune Global 500 list. It is a reliable service for almost any legal online business. It is approved not only by the prominence of the platform in the international market. The payment system is adapted for developers and has a great variety of functions and capabilities. For example, Stripe provides ready-made integration with various CRM systems, platforms for creation of sites and Internet shops, analytics systems, customer support services, EPR, etc.”

How can you connect to Stripe?

Stripe can connect to Mobile (iOS, Android, React Native), Web (Stripe.js), API (Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Node.js, Go, .NET) applications. The Stripe CLI command-line interface also helps you create, test, and manage Stripe integration directly from the terminal.

Is Stripe a growth stage of business?

“We’re building a platform for ambitious companies around the world to make moving money as simple, borderless, and programmatic as the rest of the internet.” © Stripe

Stripe is known for its industry-leading developer tools that allow business owners to integrate and customize their payment processing solutions using different programming languages. Stripe also allows your company to accept online payments from bank cards and in a short time withdraw funds directly to your bank account.

“The Stripe system features high payment processing speed and security, and from a business point of view – very convenient means of integration with sites (especially for programmers)” – commented Vladimir.

What makes Stripe different from other payment systems? What’s better Stripe or PayPal?

Stripe and PayPal are two of the best-known and most reliable payment systems in the e-commerce market. Let’s compare them on several points.

The first thing you notice when choosing a payment gateway is how easy it is to implement this solution on an existing website. PayPal has several developer tools. You don’t have to understand the code to use PayPal. All you have to do is copy and paste the code from the PayPal site to your site. It would seem – the choice is obvious! But just because PayPal is easy to set up doesn’t mean that Stripe is less available. Stripe supports more versions of CMS than PayPal, and it is possible to integrate the system into its website via Stripe plugin to their API.

In modern society, the quality of customer service is an important factor for any business.

Order Experience. By clicking on PayPal, you are logged on to a separate PayPal login page to complete your transaction. The client has to wait a few seconds (and sometimes minutes) for the checkout page loaded. The customer may feel threatened by passing his payment details when he is transferred from the original site. The ordering process at Stripe is incredibly simple. The customer enters their credit card details and translates. The operation is complete.

Transaction Costs. Stripe may turn out to be a little cheaper than PayPal when it comes to things like international payments, but eventually, you can pay more if you want to access additional features. And let us not forget that tariffs change periodically, and it always depends on the global situation in the world.

Comment from Vladimir: “There is no point in comparing – Stripe, the best and most stable payment system in the e-commerce market, priority for the American market, PayPal – for the European – Asian market. Stripe, alas to our regret at the moment, like most other services, does not work in Ukraine and most of the CIS countries, although it allows you to accept payments from different countries.”.

Stripe Statistics

• As of 2022, Stripe is available in 47 countries
• Stripe has over 2 million customers worldwide
• Currently, 3.1 million active websites use Stripe
• As of 2022, Stripe is estimated at US$94.4 billion (nearly three times more than in April 2020)
• Stripe has 39 investors
• According to Datanyze, Stripe owns 19.44% of the market share in the payment processing category, ranked by the number of websites using software
• Stripe holds 48 patents