For many small businesses looking to sell their products online, one of the questions they must ask before launching their online store is which online payment processors they should use? I will be comparing the two most popular payment processors, Paypal and Stripe. Although these are the two most used payment processors, the difference in market share is staggering, with Paypal obtaining 75% of the market share, with Stripe only possessing 6% of the market.
I’m going to compare both processors using the below three factors:
charge you a flat rate of 2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge for non – Canadian credit cards as long as you’re doing under $1 million in volume per year. This rate varies from country to country, but it’s always flat. They don’t disclose any special high volume rates. Thankfully for Irish customers, they also offer an attractive 1.4% + €0.25 per transaction on Canadian credit cards on their pay-as-you-go plan.
The base fee for PayPal is the same as Stripe, 2.9% + 30¢ for non-Canadian credit cards. Still, PayPal has several additional service fees that make things a little more complicated. These include a monthly charge for using PayPal, an additional payment for paying with American Express, international cards, and micropayments (less than $10).
Thus, PayPal fees are far more complex, and Stripe is the cheaper option in almost all cases.
One benefit of Paypal over Stripe is that PayPal usually pays out within one business day. Stripe has to roll seven-day transfers in most other countries such as Canada.
I have only had minimal dealings with PayPal’s customer support, but I have found Paypal’s email support relatively slow, and it was pretty challenging to get someone on the phone. It also has a poor customer service rating on Trust Pilot.
Stripe has open channels for their email support, and they also have an IRC channel where designers and developers can chat and get live help from real engineers. This can prove vital if you’re working through a challenging problem and need some live help. Unfortunately, Stripe doesn’t have phone support, but this is in their project roadmap. Stripe is still relatively new, and for them to build significant market share, providing excellent customer service could help give them a competitive edge over Paypal, but we will see over time.
Both Stripe and PayPal take safety very seriously. They’re both very stable and secure platforms that I have complete faith in processing payments.
Stripe.js helps ensure very high site safety. When you use Stripe.js on your website, the credit card data entered into your payment form is never sent to your server. Instead, the data is sent directly to Stripe.
This allows your business to be automatically PCI compliant because you don’t handle sensitive credit card data on your servers. Transactions are more secure because a breach of your servers won’t result in any stolen credit card data.
PayPal now has a way to store cards in a vault, but it isn’t quite the same as Stripe.js. The sensitive card data still has to go through your server first, which puts a security burden on the software developer or the customer. They’ve recently taken steps to provide better options, but these options still aren’t as secure as Stripe.js.
Overall, we prefer to use Stripe over Paypal as it provides more cost-effective fees, but their customer support and security setup have some competitive advantages over Paypal.
We hope you have found this helpful article, and thanks very much for reading it.
