Make your WooCommerce checkout process better with Stripe

Stripe is kicking ass in the payments industry, taking on the big boys like Paypal and winning. The great news is that there is now a free plugin for integrating with Stripe that will make your checkout experience incredibly simple.

We love Stripe. Founded by the incredibly talented Collison brothers from County Limerick, Ireland, Stripe is backed by serious venture capital investment by some of the biggest VC’s in Silicon Vallery – including some of the original Paypal founders.

I think a big part of Stripes success is down to their laser like focus on attacking some of the major weaknesses and points of pain in using some of the bigger payment gateway services like Paypal, namely:

• Archaic and/or incomplete integration methods which make developers heads explode in frustration
• Incredibly clunky, slow and out of date payment processing experience for both customers and merchants
• Horror stories of how Paypal has frozen Paypal accounts and merchants going out of business as a result

If Paypal had solved these issues years ago, it’s doubtful a company like Stripe could ever have succeeded. But Paypal didn’t solve these issues and Stripe stepped in and they’re now cleaning up as a result.

The biggest challenge Stripe face today is scaling globally. Demand for the service means they can’t scale quick enough. A good problem to have I guess 🙂

Stripe for WooCommerce

Up until recent there were several Stripe plugins for WooCommerce. None of them were really ideal. But one popped up in our radar today which is a reasonably new open source plugin simply called Stripe for WooCommerce.

From plugin author Stephen Zuniga:

Why does this plugin exist?
In reality, there aren’t a lot of methods you can use that provide PayPal-like convenience (and prices) for processing credit card payments directly on your site. Stripe is in the right neighborhood for developers and tech-savvy people but perhaps not for the layman, and this plugin hopes to fix that. In the Stripe interface, you have access to all kinds of information on charges, customers, and logs.

This plugin exists because the current solutions for Stripe on WooCommerce are incomplete or expensive. WooThemes made a Stripe plugin but it costs $79. Striper is the plugin that I used to initally start this plugin process and while free, was lacking a few features that I thought were necessary. It also appears to have dropped out of development recently and I hope that this plugin will fill in where it left off.

I’ve gave this plugin a whirl on our test servers and I must say I’m really impressed. It works great!

I would strongly encourage anyone who is in a country where Stripe is available who is currently using Paypal to give them a shot.