Process Credit Cards On Your Website With Stripe

Stripe - Online Payment ProcessorSince I’ve been accepting online payments, I’ve always used Paypal Standard. It was hard not to. It was free to set up, and there was no monthly fee. Paypal takes their fee from each transaction, and that fee is 2.9% + $.30 per transaction. I used a Wufoo form on my online payments page, and when the user filled out the form, they were automatically taken to Paypal to finish the transaction.

Although Paypal is known as a trusted source for processing online payments, I didn’t like having my website visitors go to a 3rd party website to finish the transaction. In addition to that, I had to manually transfer the funds from Paypal to my company’s bank account. Logging in to Paypal every time I got paid was a small pain in the rear.

Then came Stripe which allowed website owners to process payments ON their website without having to pay a monthly fee. Paypal Payments Pro allows you to do this, but Paypal charges you a $30/month fee along with their transaction fees. Not only does Stripe not charge you a monthly fee, the funds automatically get transferred to your bank account. Their transaction fees match Paypal’s at 2.9% + $.30 per transaction.

I initially heard about Stripe through Wufoo, but I didn’t want to use them at first because it took 10 days for funds to transfer into your bank account. Then I heard from a Stripe representative at this year’s Atlanta WordCamp that the time had been decreased to seven days. Seven days was still a long time for me to wait for funds to transfer to my bank account, so I was still fine with using Paypal.

After finding out that funds would be transferred into my bank account in just two business days after the initial transaction was processed, I decided to make the switch. I signed up for a Stripe account. Because I was using a Wufoo form for my online payments page, switching to Stripe was simple. I just needed to log in to my Wufoo dashboard, go to the Payment Settings, and change the merchant.

wufoo-payment-settings

After changing the payment settings, I had a client make a payment. The first transaction seemed like an eternity, but I got through it. Now, my payments only take two business days to be transferred……automatically.

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