What should you use for your online business?
Taking payments is one of the most important aspects of your business. Besides comparing commissions, it all comes down to making the payment as seamless as it can be, to make your client experience the best. That’s why choosing the right payment processor is key for your business and clients.
For the most part, Stripe and PayPal dominate the market. But which is better?
PayPal and Stripe are some of the most common alternatives for businesses to take payments. Both are definitely great options, but what suits you best will depend on you and your client’s needs and preferences.
Pricing is an important factor when considering your options, so it’s good that you take a look at their pricing depending on where you are based.Neither of them charge a monthly subscription or anything similar so that’s great.
However, they do have different transaction fees. Let’s take the UK as an example.
For comparison, PayPal charges 2.9% + £0.30 for a standard UK transaction and3.4% + £0.30 for a Europe PayPal account.
While Stripe charges 1.4% + 20p for European cards and 2.9% + 20p for non-European cards.
Now that the pricing is out of the way, there’s something more important to consider: your clients’ experience. With PayPal, your customers have to create their own account and fill out all the information for their profile, they also need to have the app installed on their devices or login on their browsers.
With Stripe, they don’t even realize that they are using it because they just have to enter their card details ONCE and that’s it, no need to create an account or enter any other information.
It’s understandable why so many people like PayPal, since it’s very popular and a lot of them already have an account, but keep in mind that not every client will have one. Making them go through the trouble of creating anew account or downloading an app just to pay you, it’s definitely not ideal(and scalable).
If you’re unfamiliar with Stripe, you may have questions about data security. Well, no need to worry, they have one of the best data security out in the market and are trusted by millions of businesses, so you and your clients are safe.
Most booking platforms like Fitune offer Stripe integrations, you can easily connect your Stripe account. That way your clients just add their cards once and are stored for future bookings, making it simple, easy and fast.
Lastly, stripe makes managing your business a breeze. They fully support subscription-based businesses with functionalities like packs, memberships, promo codes, refunds and other features to make life easier for you and your clients.
In conclusion, we recommend Stripe. It’s cheaper, better customer service, and more secure.