Stripe Payment Processing Review and Pricing

Pricing and Terms

The best online credit card processing companies have clear, transparent pricing and terms of service. Stripe is a good example of this, as it posts detailed information about its rates and transaction fees, and you can read all of its service agreements on its website. 

Stripe has simple flat-rate pricing and charges very few fees. There’s no additional cost to use Stripe’s integrations, prebuilt checkout form or developer tools. 

Here’s what you’ll pay when you accept credit card payments online using Stripe Payments. 

Accepting Online Payments

• 2.9% + $0.30 for domestic credit and debit card payments, no matter what type or brand of card your customer uses, or if they use a digital wallet.
• 0.8% with a $5 cap for ACH debit transfers. Stripe also allows you to accept ACH credit and wire transfers, and you can view pricing for these payment methods on the company’s website. 

Accepting In-Person Credit Card Payments Using Stripe Terminal

• 2.7% + $0.05 per transaction, regardless of card type or brand. 

Stripe offers volume discounts for businesses that process more than $100,000 per month, and custom pricing is available for businesses that have microtransactions or abnormally large sales tickets. Nonprofits may qualify for special pricing. 

Incidental fees you may encounter while using Stripe include the following: 

• If you accept international cards, you add 1% to the transaction rate, and if currency conversion is necessary, it costs an additional 1%.
• If a customer disputes a charge and requests a payment reversal, you pay a $15 chargeback fee. If the dispute is resolved in your favor, however, Stripe refunds this fee, which most processors don’t do.
• If you issue a refund, there’s no fee, but it doesn’t return the original processing fee to you. 

Here’s a list of the fees you won’t pay when you use Stripe as your online payment processing company: 

• No application or setup fee
• No monthly fees for statements or customer service
• No monthly minimum processing requirement
• No payment gateway setup fee
• No monthly payment gateway fee
• No annual fee
• No PCI compliance fee
• No early termination or account closure fee 

Optional Fees

Stripe offers several other products, such as Stripe Billing, Stripe Connect, Radar for Fraud Teams, Stripe Sigma and Stripe Atlas. If you choose to use them, other fees apply. You can learn more about these products and what they cost on the company’s website. 

Payouts

Once you begin accepting credit card payments using Stripe, you must wait seven to 10 days for the company to transfer the money from your transactions into your bank account. After this initial payout, your funds are transferred on a rolling schedule of either two or seven days. Most businesses are on the two-day schedule – which is an average amount of time – but if Stripe considers your business to be a higher risk, you’re on the seven-day schedule. If your cash flow is often tight and you need to receive your money faster, you might want to consider a different processor, as many offer next-day deposits and some, such as PayPal and Square, offer instant transfers for an additional fee. 

Terms of Service

Stripe Payments offers its services on a pay-as-you-go basis, so you can close your account at any time without incurring expensive early termination fees. Instead of signing a multiyear contract, you accept a service agreement that you can read in full on the company’s website. As with all payment processing companies, you want to take the time to read this document before signing up with the company to make sure it’s a good fit for your business and you understand what you’re agreeing to. 

Like many processors that offer flat-rate pricing with few fees, Stripe doesn’t provide you with your own merchant account, and, instead, sets you up as a submerchant under its master merchant account. This has some advantages, such as faster account setup that doesn’t require a credit check and simplified PCI compliance with no PCI-related fees. However, Stripe and other merchant aggregators receive a lot of complaints online about frozen funds and sudden account terminations. You can reduce your chances of experiencing these issues by reading the service agreement and complying with its terms. 

You want to make sure that … 

• Your business type and the products and services you sell aren’t on Stripe’s prohibited businesses.
• You use Stripe’s services as they’re intended to be used. For example, you can’t use Stripe Dashboard as a virtual terminal except in rare circumstances. Using it in this manner on a regular basis is specifically forbidden in the service agreement.
• You comply with network rules and do your part to keep card data secure, in accordance with PCI standards. 

As Stripe explained in a letter to the Better Business Bureau, per its service agreement, Stripe reserves the right to hold your funds in a reserve account if it suspects there’s a risk of loss or fraud, or if you have a lot of chargebacks. It may close your account if it determines your business is a fraud or credit risk, if you offer products or services on its prohibited businesses list, use the service in an unauthorized way or violate terms of the agreement. 

Features

Stripe says that it offers more than 100 features, and this wealth of capabilities allows many different business types and sizes to use Stripe as their online payment processing service. 

You can choose from premade solutions that you connect to with just a few clicks or payment flows custom-built by your development team. 

Stripe is regularly updated, and each month the company posts a changelog on its blog that shows new features or improvements to its existing capabilities. 

Here are some of the products and features Stripe offers. 

Integrations

The easiest way to use Stripe is to connect to it from one of the business applications you already use. Stripe offers hundreds of integrations across multiple categories so you can start accepting payments quickly, then automatically sync your sales data to the other programs you use. For example, if you use an e-commerce platform for your online store, you can choose Stripe as your payment processor and connect to your account with just a few clicks. You can then connect your Stripe account to many of the other programs you already use, such as your accounting, invoicing, inventory management, CRM and marketing software. Plugins for third-party services are also available. 

Checkout

The second easiest way to use Stripe is to embed Checkout, a premade checkout form, into your existing website. To do this, you copy and paste a few lines of JavaScript. The form redirects the customer to a Stripe-hosted payment page that you can customize with your branding and product images. Checkout is PCI compliant and tokenizes your customer’s payment data so it’s never stored on your server. 

Stripe Elements

If you have some coding skills, you can use Stripe’s prebuilt UI elements – input fields and buttons – to create a customized checkout form that complements the look and feel of your website. As with Checkout, Elements is PCI compliant, and Stripe takes care of the heavy back-end coding – all you’re doing is customizing the look and format of the checkout form. 

Stripe.js

This method for using Stipe to accept payments on your website requires more development know-how, as it allows you to use Stripe’s JavaScript library and APIs to build a checkout form of your own. 

Stripe Billing

This API allows you to create a customized solution for recurring payments and subscription billing. You can decide how to charge customers, such as a flat recurring fee or a charge based on product usage or tiers. You can choose how frequently you bill your customers and offer discounts and trial periods. 

Stripe Connect

Stripe can provide payment services for marketplaces and platforms, taking care of onboarding users, managing payments, handling compliance issues, tax reporting and more. 

Stripe Terminal

You can now use Stripe to accept in-person. You can integrate Stripe Terminal into your existing checkout flow, or use its SDKs to create your own mobile or web-based app. The company offers two card readers to use with this payment method. Both are EMV-certified and support chip cards and contactless payments, including mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

• The BBPOS Chipper 2X BT, which costs $59, is a mobile card reader that uses Bluetooth to connects to smartphones and tablets.
• Verifone P400, which costs $299, is a countertop credit card terminal. 

Mobile Payment Options

If you have a mobile app, you can boost sales by adding in-app payments to it, letting your customers shop and complete purchases with it. Stripe payments are currently supported on iOS and Android devices. 

Digital Wallet Support

Stripe allows you to accept payments made using digital wallets. In addition to Apple Pay and Google Pay, it supports Visa Checkout, Masterpass by Mastercard, Amex Express Checkout, Microsoft Pay, Alipay and WeChat Pay. 

International Currency Support

For businesses with customers outside the U.S., Stripe is a good option because it allows your customers to pay with their local currency. Stripe then converts it, so you receive your funds in your currency. It supports more than 135 currencies. 

Dashboard App

Available for both Android phones and iPhones, the Stripe Dashboard app allows you to track your sales when you’re away from the office. You can issue refunds, set alerts, and view daily summaries, reports and historical comparisons on the Android version. On the Apple version, you can also email customers, search transactions and create new customer subscriptions. 

Reporting

You can view your sales data and account balance history in the dashboard. It has several built-in reports, and you can export your data to CSV files. If you integrate Stripe with other programs, such as your accounting software, it automatically syncs to that application. If you want advanced reporting capabilities, you can use Stripe Sigma for an extra cost. 

July 2020: Stripe has added a customer portal feature to Stripe Billing, its invoice and subscription billing service. With it, your customers can manage their billing details themselves – which can save you time, since your customers will be able to view their accounts to check their billing history, upgrade or downgrade their subscription, cancel their subscription, and update their payment method. This is a prebuilt solution, which means it’s easy to set up, and Stripe hosts it to keep it secure. You can, however, customize it to match your brand by adding your logo, brand color and accent color, and you can add links to helpful information on your website, such as your terms of service.

Additional Considerations

Here’s some additional information about Stripe to keep in mind as you select a payment processing company for your business. 

Security

Stripe takes data security seriously and has multiple security protocols in place to keep your customers’ payment data secure. It uses tokenization technology, so no actual payment data is stored on your servers, and includes Radar, its fraud-prevention tool, with every account. 

PCI Compliance

Stripe is a PCI Service Provider Level 1, the highest certification available, but you’re still required to comply with PCI data security standards and complete a self-assessment questionnaire each year. It doesn’t charge a PCI compliance fee. 

Customer Support

 If you need help using Stripe, you can email the company or use its online resources, which include searchable documentation, reference guides, articles, tutorials and FAQs. 

Limitations

Stripe is unique in that it’s designed for developers, and while this is one of the reasons it’s such a versatile product, it can be overwhelming for small business owners who aren’t developers. 

Even figuring out how to use Stripe and where to find its easy-to-use products, such as its integrations and Stripe Checkout, is challenging, and you may need to hire a developer if you want any customizations. 

Here are some additional points to consider before signing up with Stripe. 

• Stripe doesn’t provide inbound phone support. If you run into a problem while using Stripe, you’ll have to email the company.
• As discussed above, Stripe is like other merchant aggregators in that it’s wary of risk compared to full-service processors. It may hold your funds or close your account if you have a lot of chargebacks or if there’s something irregular about your transactions, such as an abnormally high sales ticket, that makes Stripe suspect fraudulent activity.