Stripe: Reliable but there are better options out there
October 04, 2019
Stripe: Reliable but there are better options out there
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Stripe
We use Stripe as our credit card payments processor for all card sales in our online store. In our experience, some customers did not want to use Paypal (mistakenly) thinking that they had to set up an account, so this covers those bases.
- Reliable function. We have never had any downtime, not any errors in processing.
- Lots of information at your fingertips. The analytics area are very useful.
- Ability to manage payments directly from Stripe such as refunds and view exact reasons why a payment might have been declined was very useful to have.
- Very easy integration into our e-commerce store.
- We never fully engaged with Stripe's full offering. Amongst other things it can hold customer data for regular billing and can be developed to become an order management system but a mixture of being well provided for by our own e-commerce hosts on our part, and a lack of "interestingness" to their offer on Stripe's part, meant we didn't research this any further.
- Dull interface: the dashboard went through a redesign a while back and we still miss the previous version for being clearer and more concise than the current
- Payments take a week to be deposited into our bank account. This is, in our view, far too long and it is the main reason why we'll be moving away from Stripe. However, this doesn't seem to be the case for all merchants so perhaps it affects only our territory?
- Some rooting around is needed to find reasons behind failed payments, and no notification is given that a payment has failed. This could be better communicated.
- The ability to add a credit card payment option for those customers who for their own reasons do not trust other payment gateways meant we were able to capture more sales so a definite positive.
- Stripe made it very easy to produce tailored sales reports so this has been a great time saver when compared to our previous methods.
- However, the long wait for funds to be deposited into our account brought some challenges in managing our cash flow.
Where Stripe takes around a week to deposit funds, Square does this the following day and there is an option to have funds sent same day (at a charge). As our average order price level is under £50 and is often under £20, the cost per transaction for us with Stripe is also higher (1.4% + £0.20) than with Square (1.75%). If the average order were higher, the odds would then be stacked in Stripe's favour, however. Square's user interface is also much more intuitive - and much jollier than Stripe's super serious tone!
Do you think Stripe Payments delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Stripe Payments's feature set?
Yes
Did Stripe Payments live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Stripe Payments go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Stripe Payments again?
Yes