Is Stripe best for your small business?

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I’m going to be completely honest with you from the beginning.

This article is going to be the least balanced piece of content on the internet as to why you NEED to use Stripe if you want to process payments online.

The reason for this?

We are massive Stripe fans. So much so that we're actually verified Stripe partners.

We do, however, have one criticism but we’ll get to that at the end.

Anyway, enough about us.

You’ve probably come here because you’re interested in getting answers to these 2 questions:

1. What is Stripe?

2. Is Stripe the best option for your small business?

So, that’s exactly what I’m going to answer now:

1. What is Stripe:

Stripe is a 10-year-old company valued at $95 billion, founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison at the age of 22 and 20, respectively.

To give you some context around their back story, they started this company 2 years after selling their first company for $5 million.

As someone who just turned 22, I’m feeling pretty underaccomplished right now.

Back in 2011, the Collison brothers set out to make it easier to accept payments online.

From building their other products they realised this process was far too difficult and clunky.

Fast forward to 2021, the company’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.

This is certainly no small task, but going on the following statistics, it sounds like they're doing a pretty good job so far:

Last year, Stripe processed a volume of $250 billion worth of payments for businesses in 43 different countries across the world.

Stripe itself is now bigger than (by payment volumes) the entire e-commerce market was when they started working on Stripe.

In 2020 their systems handled 5,000 requests a second.

Another fun fact: According to data from BuiltWith, there are 1,957,864 live websites that use Stripe.


But again, I know you’re not here for fun facts. So, what does Stripe actually do?

Stripe is the complete* platform for all of your payment needs.

(I will come back to that asterisks soon).

They have you covered for everything you could ever need and more. Everything from Accepting, Processing, settling and reconciling and managing payments.

There’s so much, you can just check it out here


So, this is a ton of features, right? Well, That’s just from one product from Stripe, their payments stack.

Here is a screenshot from their website showing all of their products:


Stripe really has everything you could ever need when it comes to taking payments.

It’s really no surprise that some of their customers include Monzo, Slack, Deliveroo and so many other massive businesses

2. Is Stripe the best option for your small business?

So Stripe is amazing for these huge companies.

But What about your small business?

We know that Stripe has all the functionality you could ever dream of, so let's consider three important factors:

-price, security and ease of use.

Price - 10/10

The price of Stripe varies depending on where you are in the world, so to save any confusion I’m just going to link their pricing page right here

As I’m in the UK, the price is 1.4% + 20p transaction fee for European cards taking one-off payments.

I would say this is pretty great value when you consider what it enables you to access. Also, if you compare this with Paypal's 2.9% + 30p, it really seems like quite a bargain.

Security - 10/10

They are certified to PCI service provider level 1, which is the most stringent level of certification available in the payments industry.

Their website goes into so much more technical detail about this and if that's something you're interested in, you should definitely check it out. A truly enthralling read.

Ease of use - 5/10

This is where I want to address the asterisks over Stripe being the complete platform for all your payment needs.

The caveat is that it only does all of these amazing things if you have the technical ability to use it.

If you don’t have strong technical skills, you won’t be able to fully utilise all that Stripe has to offer.

If you take one look at Stripes website, you’ll clearly see that it’s targeted towards developers, using scary language like API’s (something I always overhear our developers chatting about?)


The solution

But don’t lose hope just yet because we have a solution for you.

You know how I mentioned earlier that we’re actually verified Stripe partners?

Well, that's because our business solves this exact problem:

Stripe is the best payment solution, but it’s very technical to use.

Our product, called Payhere enables anyone to make use of all the amazing features Stripe has to offer.

What’s stopping you?

Now that you know how amazing Stripe is, we can help you get set up in minutes.

Within Payhere you can create a Stripe account or connect your existing account. Then, make your payment links, connect to your website and even make your own one-page payment website.

Create your account here for free:

➡️ Payhere.co ⬅️

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me an email at joel@payhere.co

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