What is Stripe and how does it work?

If you're looking to accept online payments quickly and securely, you'll very soon hear about Stripe.

Created in 2010, this American company has become in a few years the global reference for integrating payment systems into web apps, mobile apps, or e-commerce platforms.

But it's also a complex ecosystem, which isn't easy to understand at first, hence this little guide

Quick overview of Stripe

Stripe is above all a payment platform.

Its goal: to make it as simple as possible for a company to accept money online, mainly via credit card (but not only).

Whether you're a startup, an online store, or a freelance developer, Stripe offers tools that will help you:

• APIs to integrate payment into your application
• Ready-to-use interfaces (like Stripe Checkout)
• A complete back-office to track and manage your payments, subscriptions and refunds

Everything is designed to be quick to set up, secure and adaptable to different business models. You can create an account right here: https://stripe.com/fr

What can you do with Stripe?

As mentioned, Stripe isn't just a "payment button", it's a complete ecosystem.

This is actually what can make it complex to use correctly.

Here's a short list of features by platform or API:

• Accept payments by credit card, but also via Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA, etc.
• Create subscriptions and manage recurring billing (SaaS model)
• Send invoices automatically (or on demand)
• Sell one-off products or services (via a simple link or an API)
• Manage discount vouchers (coupons, discounts on a payment or a subscription)
• Create marketplaces and redistribute payments among several users
• Automatically calculate VAT or other taxes based on the customer's location
• Manage fraud risks and canceled payments

And you can even have an entire test environment to check that everything works well in your payment workflow, with test credit cards!

Stripe's main products

Stripe offers several products, depending on the level of complexity and customization you need for your payments:

• Stripe Checkout: a payment page hosted by Stripe, highly customizable.
  • You decide when and how it's displayed, and how it integrates into your application. Ideal for controlling the user journey while benefiting from Stripe's security.
• Stripe Payment Links: an even simpler solution.
  • No need to code, you create a link directly from the Stripe dashboard, and the user is taken care of from A to Z. Perfect for selling a one-off product, but less customizable.
• Stripe Elements: a library of components (credit card fields, etc.)
  • To build your own payment form.

Summary: Stripe Checkout and Stripe Elements require handling certain operations on your server (back-end), but payment link can be used without anything else!

There are dozens of other products offered by Stripe, but most of them integrate directly into Stripe's automated workflow (invoice generation, fraud detection, etc.), so you won't need to do any technical integration!

Who uses Stripe?

Companies like Amazon, Netflix, Shopify, Deliveroo, TF1, Google, HelloAsso, Booking, Zoom, Shopify and even Code-Garage use Stripe today to manage all or part of their payment infrastructure.

Today Stripe is clearly the undisputed market leader

Alternatives

If you're looking for an alternative to Stripe, you can also check out:

• LemonSqueezy (The main competitor)
• Polar (used by UNeed)
• Paddle.com (used by Plausible)
• MangoPay (mainly for marketplaces)

Special mention for Polar, whose DX is the easiest to get started with