Stripe is a relatively new option as a way to take online payments on your ecommerce website. And it quickly became a favourite with ecommerce shop users because its fees rates are more cost effective than PayPal
Stripe Fee Structure
1.4% + €0.25: for European cards excluding VAT.2.9% + €0.25 for non-European cards excluding VAT.
https://stripe.com/ie/pricing
Some of the features of using Stripe
- The customer does not leave your website. They are redirected to Stripes Secure Servers but it looks as though everything is happening on your site. The Checkout is embedded on your website so customers can pay directly, reducing the number of steps to complete an order. Please note: you have to a secure cert installed on your website for this to work.
- The payment form is designed for you. You can either have it integrated into your checkout page or you can have a modal box appear
- Another nice feature is that customers can save their cards for quick payment next time round. Their credit card info is saved on Stripe’s servers so no need for you to worry about it.
- Works seamlessly on mobile
- Accept payments from anyone anywhere.
- Payment details available to export to csv from the payment control panel
- You can take credit card details over the phone from within the Stripe Control Panel.
An example of a Stripe Modal box payment checkout
Some Stripe Requirements to be aware of
Stripe pay on you on 7 day rolling basis. So if you get paid for an order today, Stripe will transfer the money into your bank account in 7 days. If immediate funds is a requirement then you may need to look at other alternatives to Stripe.
If you don’t already have one you will need to install an SSL Certificate on your website to ensure communication between your website and Stripe are secure. This is probably worth doing anyway if you are running an ecommerce website
“We’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web”
Google’s announcement that they are boosting secure sites in search engine ranking. See: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
Stripe vs Paypal
Stripe is a good alternative to PayPal if you are finding your customers don’t like going off to PayPal to make payments, or you have got to a stage where you could do with paying less for each credit card payment.
Unless you are doing are doing more than €2,500 worth of online sales per month via Paypal then you are paying them 3.4% + 35c per transaction. See here for PayPal Rates. This is 2% + 10c more than Stripe on European cards and 0.5% and 10c per transaction more for USA payments.
Another advantage is that it doesn’t look as though the customer is leaving your website, whereas on Paypal they are redirected to PayPal.com where they make their payment and then come back to your site. This increases the payment time and number of steps to complete which could impact order dropoff.
Another complaint with PayPal is that it looks as though you have to sign-up for a PayPal account if you don’t already have one. This is not true but they don’t make it obvious that you can just pay with your credit card.
Using the Woocommerce Stripe Payment Gateway Plugin
There are a number of plugins that will integrate Stripe with Woocommerce but Woocommerce actually provide one for free so that is the one I use. See: https://www.woothemes.com/products/stripe/
They have also integrated refunds into it via Stripe if you are running Woocommerce 2.2+
A valid SSL certificate is required to ensure your customer credit card details are safe, however, this plugin also uses Stripe JS to tokenize credit card numbers to make payments keeping card data secure.
It is easy enough to install as a plugin and you can test the installation using the Stripe Test API Keys before going live.
Conclusion
If you are looking to reduce your online credit card transaction fees and don’t mind about the 7 day rolling money transfer from Stripe to your bank account then Stripe is an excellent option. But some customers may still prefer using Paypal for online payments but there is no reason why can’t have them both running in Woocommerce and give your customers the choice.
