After much deliberation, tea, cakes and multiple cups of coffee, the Appointedd team decided to use Stripe as the software’s payment processor.

We looked into a vast array of different payment processing companies to assess our options and to find out which company would fit best into our system. Eventually, after looking at who ticked the most boxes, it was Stripe.

Stripe isn’t as popular in the UK as in the US, which is why you might not have heard of it. But some the biggest businesses on the web use Stripe. These include Pinterest, Twitter, The Guardian newspaper, our admin integration partner FreeAgent and Shopify. Plus loads more!

There are numerous reasons we chose Stripe and I’ll share with you the most important we took into consideration when we made the decision.

International Payment Processing – We have businesses using our booking software from all over the world. Stripe slots in nicely and handles all of the international payment tough bits, including currency exchange for us. That way there’s less for our customers to handle, making the use of our software simpler.

No Strange Bouncing Around – The best example for this is PayPal. When a payment is processing it takes a user away from the current booking process to another page hosted by PayPal. Our Stripe system keeps a customer using the software within any of our booking tools, making the purchase experience a more fluid one.

Stripe’s Dashboard – Stripe has an extremely talented team and they have produced an amazing dashboard that’s great to work with, making it easy for our customers using the software to manage all their payments from bookings.

Small Business Friendly Transaction Fee – We work with a lot of small businesses and cashflow is king. The less a payment processor takes as a fee from them, the better. Keeping in mind that handling money isn’t an easy or cheap thing to do, working with a fair and transparent processor who made it easy for businesses to understand how much they were taking (and why) was important. Stripe takes a 1.9% + 20p fee for domestic cards and 2.9% + 20p for international cards per successful transaction – one of the cheapest providers on the market.

Secure – Keeping our customers’ data safe is important. Stripe only allows the movement between their servers and ours to be done using an SSL certificate, which is an industry standard way of securely moving data around the web.

Unbranded Checkout – To keep the customer experience fluid, when customers are prompted to enter their payment information, the gateway (checkout) in which they do so is unbranded by Stripe.

Accept Most Credit & Debit Cards – To avoid missing out on any customer payments, it was essential that our payment processor accepted as many cards as possible. Stripe handles all the cards you could think of and more. They even accept bitcoin and Apple pay.

If you’re still unsure about why we use Stripe or have a question about Stripe. They have a huge support section on their website. Or if you have a question about how we work with Stripe, get in touch with our support team.

Published on 29 June 2015