We find Stripe is the best place for many small businesses to start collecting payments. I thought it may help to understand our recommendation.
Stripe is one of the largest payment processors (merchant facilities) in the world, second to PayPal. Stripe is a 48 billion dollar business with 30% of the market share in Australia. Worldwide it powers 140,000 websites and countless other businesses.
Unlike banks who want trading projections, historical sales and application fees, getting a Stripe account easy and fast. It has no application fee, no monthly fees, and no contract or obligation. Cancel or replace it whenever you choose.
Merchant facilities with most banks will start charging a small business over 2.5% of all your sales. They also charge a gateway fee of $0.30-$0.90 per transaction. Banks only offer lower rates after you have demonstrated more historical sales. Stripe charges 1.76% + $0.30 and you don’t need to have big sales to get this competitive rate.
All facilities penalise certain business for being risky, small, or bad history. Sorry, its no reflection on individuals but certain industries have had more complaints and charge-backs. Stripe temporarily penalise some industries with a 14-day delay getting your funds. Banks penalise some industries and businesses with higher fees. As businesses demonstrate a good trading history, Stripe and banks may offer better terms and rates.
Stripe is the most integrated merchant facility in the world. This reduces the need for manual processes. For example, all the booking and billing systems we test are compatible with Stripe. None are compatible with local banks, you would need to process all the payments manually. I’m not going to go into detail here about the ridiculous amount of billing features offered by the Stripe online platform.
Here are a few alternative credit card merchant services:
https://www.integrapay.com.au/
We have no affiliation with Stripe. We derive no income from recommending their service. Clients sometimes ask us to assist them choose and integrate their website with external systems and we charge for research.
We are not experts in business systems or operating your business. When requested we are contracted to research and help select business systems. Business owners are solely responsible for testing, selecting, learning and operating any business system. Most of these business system offer support to their customers. We never provide support, training, or implementation of these business systems.
When supporting websites, we solve connection issues with external systems like payment facilities. Sometimes, this includes communicating with these third parties suppliers. Anything more than connection issues are outside of our standard scope of website maintenance. We charge for any help at our standard hourly support rates.