Why Choose Stripe over Paypal?

It would of course be ideal if you could give the customers the choice on how they would want to pay you for products bought or services rendered. If you can, it may be better to keep both PayPal and Stripe options available on your website. Let the customers decide for themselves which of the two they are more comfortable working with. However, if you must choose between one or the other, there are many arguments in favour of opting  for Stripe rather than setting up a new PayPal merchant account.

Stripe can process payments on your site directly, thus allowing you to be in better control of the transactions. With Stripe, customers do not have to leave your site to buy products from you. They just click on the “Pay with Card” button on your site. The payment forms are hosted on your own site. Customers do not have to go to the Stripe website to pay.

In contrast, customers who click on PayPal’s “Buy Now” button will have to be redirected to the PayPal site where the actual processing of the payment will be done. At the third-party PayPal site, your customers will be asked to log-in, or if they do not have an account yet, will be asked to go through a slightly lengthier, complicated registration and vetting process before they can be allowed to make the payment.

PayPal can also get the entire payment process hosted on your site under its “Payments Advanced” and “Payments Pro” plans but then, you have to pay a $5 or $30 monthly fee for this sort of service. Stripe offers its on-site payments processing service for free.

Both PayPal and Stripe charge 2.9% + 30 cents per successful transaction. However, PayPal begins scaling down its pricing for over $3,000 per month transactions. Stripe’s pricing on the other hand remains constant regardless of sales volume at this point in time. But then again, PayPal usually has hidden costs based on some obscure rules like charging 3.5% per transaction for accepting payments made with American Express or charging an additional 1% for each transaction involving customers who use international credit cards.

With Stripe, your money can be deposited automatically directly to your checking or savings bank account. With PayPal, you have to manually initiate every transfers or deposits to your bank when you need to.

Possibly one area where PayPal has a clear advantage over Stripe though is in ease of setup. Businesses can just copy the necessary code for the “Buy Now” button from PayPal’s website and paste it into their websites, and then they’re done. They can start accepting payments through PayPal immediately.

The same ease of setup however cannot be said of Stripe’s “Pay with Card” button. After all, even Stripe dubs itself as the “Payments for Developers” company. For business owners who are not developers and who do not have any coding experience, it may be advisable to get in touch with a professional programming and web solution provider. At New Age Design, we specialise in integrating websites to the Stripe Payment gateway. Call us now to find out more about how your business can take advantage of this PayPal alternative.

Here is a link to the Official Stripe Website