A payment gateway is an e-commerce application that authorises credit card and direct debit processing through your website. Offering a secure payment gateway is a vital part of your e-commerce website as it is likely to influence whether or not your customer makes a purchase.
There are so many e-commerce applications available with different service offerings, features and benefits, but we’re going to tell you about Stripe and why it’s our preferred payment gateway.
Stripe is the new kid on the block in a sense and although it launched in 2011, the payment gateway only became available in Australia last year. It is one of the only payment companies in Australia that supports multi-currency and can process credit cards from over 110 different countries, without the need to set up separate merchant facilities. Below we have a closer look at Stripe’s features.
Stripes features for eCommerce websites
One of the major benefits of Stripe is it enables user to stay on your site when making a payment, instead of being redirected to another site. There is no set up cost or monthly fees and set up is instant. Other benefits include:
- Easy to setup recurring payments
- Trial periods with a delayed payment
- Can offer your customers discounts and coupon codes
- Enables you to set up subscription payments
- If a customer changes their subscription mid-billing, Stripe gives you the ability to pro-rata charges
- Ability to easily rebill a customer without storing credit card details
- Excellent reminder system
- No refund fees
- Informative interface of graphs and charts, makes data comprehensible and clear
- Seamless checkout experience means increased conversions
A web developer’s perspective
We have used many payment gateways as web developers and find some to be quite fiddly and time consuming. We’ve found Stripe to be one of the easiest to setup, integrate and maintain, due to it having a great API. It also gives a developer full control over the look and feel of the entire payment experience.
The benefits from a customer’s perspective
Stripe is a much more powerful alternative to Paypal, which takes your users offsite when making a payment. Secondly, Stripe is not tied to a specific bank and is one of the only payment companies in Australia that supports multi-currency, without the need to apply for an Internet Merchant Account. Stripe also offers secure interaction with its servers to keep your customers’ data safe. All in all, with no set up fees, no monthly fees, no minimum charges and no card storage fees, Stripe makes everything easy!
If you would like to know more about Stripe and integrating it into your e-commerce site, call us on 1300 664 435.
Digital Bridge is a Melbourne-based web development agency that’s big on ideas and low on jargon. We specialise in designing, developing and managing websites for people like you and businesses like yours.