Stripe

Stripe has become a popular payment vendor which you can integrate on your website in order to take payments. It's free to get started and you're never charged unless you make a sale through their system. Currently it's 2.9% of each successful transaction total plus $0.30. If you have a refund you are reimbursed for this charge and there's no contracts or monthly fees at all. No credit card storage fees either it's actually really easy to sign up and get going within a few minutes. I immediately noticed how easy my account was when I logged into it again for the first time in a few months. The user interface is very easy to learn and use. I also noted how quick it loads up each page it's very fast. Everything you need is either available from you dashboard or in your settings. It's not bloated or a busy interface in any way. Compared to Paypal even after their overhaul a couple of years since it became much easier to use it is simpler. We've just officially launched so I'm considering all of our options before we really start to scale up. Using Stripe allows you to take payments right from your website securely without having to store that credit card information on your servers at anytime. You're not re-directing customers to the Paypal site for example linked off of your site. There's the WP Stripe plugin I believe it's called which helps you make this even easier if you're using Wordpress which we are. Though with Woocommerce and there's Stripe plugins for this ecommerce platform as well. There's a good amount of documentation available for Stripe right from your dashboard with lots of explanation available for what you're doing. This makes it really easy to get the help you need while their is pretty active Stripe community which you can turn too as well. It's easy to use a lot of different languages and that is one of the best features of Stripe. It's very reliable by all accounts with downtime practically never an issue so that's good to know. The subscription features are very robust. You can easily setup recurring payments which is the best kind of income there is. And the test environment is very good so you can ensure everything is working prior to going live with your new product or service.

You must use SSL on your site which is a good thing but it's another cost to consider for any start up and although they are relatively easy to install some less technically savvy folks would have an extra cost to hire someone to do so for them. I don't see options for coupons or discounts for one time purchases available which is unfortunate. There's a work around of course you can do the math and offer that price but why not have it be automated like it is for the subscriptions? That it isn't is sort of boggling in my opinion. It seems obvious that it should be for both types as both types of products and services exist. Also, the ability to send your clients their invoice is not as refined and efficient as it could be if you're having to do this a lot there are custom proposal software out there that out do it in this area.

The Stripe platform is excellent in almost every way. Other than the lack of special offer functionality for single purchases there is nothing to dislike in my opinion. I have had my Stripe account for a couple of years and have sent a few invoices using it from my Wave account but the delays weren't practical and the fees were more than doing an email transfer so I canceled them both times. And that was the only thing holding me back at the time from using it as my services were one time payments, or two or three payments at most until completion. And we used flexible deadlines so there wasn't a set recurring schedule to set so it just made sense not to have to wait the first seven business days it takes to get going. And spend the percentage of fees it took when I ended up taking payment within the hour directly into my bank account for a dollar fifty. But now with my latest startup project we are definitely B2C offering a physical product shipped across the country. And while we have plans for a great recurring revenue stream we ship single products at the moment and have special offers. We can't set up a special price for each customer nor adjust the retail as that shouldn't be a requirement in order to give a special offer to your customers. So as much as I really like how simple it is to use and fast it loads up what you need we aren't ready for the subscription user base yet so will have to bookmark it and use it for that later this year.