Why should you choose Stripe payment for online stores and saas products?

Payment processing is one of the modules of any E-commerce store, SAAS product, or any other invoicing and billing system. You require money to pay your bills and cover the product operating cost.

If you start an online payment solution, you need to find a suitable payment processing service. Searching on the Internet gives you many payment processing service options, and each has its good and bad points.

A good payment processing service avoids all worries about your financial issues.

Some examples of good payment processing services are PayU, Razorpay, CCAvenue, Stripe payment, PayPal, Amazon pay, Google pay, Apple Pay, and many more.

Your task is to find which payment processing service is best suitable for your online commerce. Some of the filter criteria may include;

1. Ease of integration. And options to choose from different payment sources – Credit card, Debit card, Internet Banking, and many more.
2. Local and International payment.
3. Different ways of integration.
4. Set up fees and other charges.
5. Financial reports and order management.

I explored the Stripe payment service, and I was delighted after using it. It fits into all of the above criteria, and I did not find why you should not integrate it.

My verdict is, you can use it without any issue.

What is Stripe payment?

Stripe is the complete payment suite that allows a business to receive money from customers located anywhere in the world. It supports 135 countries and almost all major currencies.

What are the prerequisites for integrating the Stripe payment?

1. You need to create an account.
2. You require the publishable key – public key - and secret key – private key – to make any API request. You do not need to generate these keys. The Stripe payment creates these for you. You need to copy and save them for later use.
3. You need to activate your account before enabling any mode – Test or Live. Stripe collects your business information in this step so that it can make the best judgment call before allowing you to integrate Stripe products.
4. You need to enable either Test mode – for testing the API integration – or Live mode – for actual live site integration.

You are ready to receive payment from your customer using Stripe payment.

What are different ways to integrate it?

It depends on your requirements. You can use the prebuilt iOS UI interface for the iPhone application and the prebuilt Android UI interface for the Android application. But there are two different ways to collect an online payment as follows;

1. Prebuilt checkout page: You do not need to take card information, and you do not need to worry about security. The checkout link navigates to the prebuilt checkout page, where your customer can enter all required information. You get the proper payment completion feedback – succeed or failed.
2. Custom payment flow: If you have different steps for checkout, you can integrate the Stripe library and start creating your checkout flow. You need to care about card security and proper API request. Also, you require to handle all error scenarios in case of payment failure.

In my opinion, if your online store or SAAS product is new, you should integrate the prebuilt checkout page to avoid all the hassle in the payment processing.

And, do not worry. You can create the custom checkout process later.

Why should I use it?

Easy integration:

Stripe payment has raw API and other libraries to integrate it in any language. It supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Node, Java, Go, and DotNet. If you use any other language, you can use the REST API to access all the information.

If you develop a mobile application, you have iOS and Android SDK for Stripe payment integration.

Overall, as a product owner, you do not need to worry about technical platforms and compatibility issues.

Flat fee – pay as you go:

The charges are flat. You do not need to pay any setup fees or recurrent billing fees. It only charges 2% on domestic cards – Visa or Mastercard issued in India - or 3% on international cards. The Stripe fees exclude the GST part – 18% of the charge.

You can read more about the charges here. https://stripe.com/in/pricing

The best thing about the Stripe payment, you do not need to worry about any hidden charges.

Great tutorial and documentation:

Initially, I thought of creating a complete guide for integrating Stripe payment. But, after looking at the well-written documentation, I dropped my idea. Now, I wrote this blog so that you and I could refer to it in the future.

Developer dashboard:

It allows a developer to see the different API calls and their status in a single dashboard. It helps a developer find any failure reason in case of payment failure.

Payment dashboard:

This dashboard shows you the status of your payment history. It gives you a glimpse of how your e-commerce store is performing.

You can generate various reports to understand the financial performance like Balance, Payment reconciliation, Revenue, and many more.

Why should I not use it?

After using Stripe payment on several websites, I do not find any difficulty using it. And my customers did not find any issue during the usage. And therefore, I can not give a single reason why you should not use it.

But in my opinion, you can avoid Stripe if;

1. You find any other good payment processing service having lower fee rates.
2. You do not have access to the developer. And another service provider is ready to integrate their API without extra payment.
3. You have a specialized case where Stripe does fit well.