Stripe Shopping Cart: How to Start Accepting Stripe Payments with PayKickstart

In the flood of new and emerging payment methods, it’s hard to find what’s best for your business. Working with merchants, gateways, security, it can all get to be a series of hurdles you have to face… as if starting a new business is not overwhelming enough!

Accepting online payments can become surprisingly difficult, at best, and downright dangerous at worst. When it comes to handling users’ sensitive data, you want to make sure that you work with a trustworthy and reliable partner that can handle payment processing properly.

There are a few solutions allowing you to make the process a bit easier (but still obviously requiring integration). One of them is Stripe:

What Is Stripe Payment Processing?

Stripe is a payment processing platform aiming to enable you to accept all major debit and credit cards from customers worldwide while bypassing gateways and merchant accounts. It’s also quite affordable and doesn’t require any upfront investment which makes it a solid solution for startups or new businesses.

With Stripe there are no monthly charges. They do ask for 2.9% and .30 cents per processed payment.

To sum up the reasons why you may want to consider using Stripe as your payment processing solution:

1. Stripe is secure: It handles the whole payment processing, including fraud prevention, and subscription management.
2. Stripe is affordable and transparent. Other payment merchants are good at hiding fees from you. (More on pricing below)
3. Stripe is trusted: Big names that use it include Reddit, Shopify, and Grooveshark. If big companies find it trustworthy enough, you may be rest assured that have did their background check.
4. Stripe is ready to innovate: It implements modern technology to help you eliminate online selling risks. For example, its machine-learning-driven self-learning algorithm identifies patterns and signs alerting of a dispute risk before it actually happens.
5. Stripe offers fast customer support which makes it a better choice than most payment processing solutions out there
6. Stripe also happens to endorse PayKickstart as their official integration partner making it easy to integrate into your shopping cart.

Another powerful argument in favor for Stripe processing is the company’s strong support for new entrepreneurs. With Stripe Atlas solution you can get your business incorporated easily. The platform also connects to the whole community of new entrepreneurs like yourself for further help and support.

How much does Stripe cost per month?

As it has been mentioned above, Stripe is considered one of the most transparent and easiest payment processing networks out there. The full list of charges you’ll incur include:

• Stripe charges 2.9% + .30 per transaction
• International card processing is additional 1% per transaction (currency conversion fee)
• You will be charged $15 chargeback fees levied by the card network
• If your business is in the US, you can accept ACH Credit payments through Stripe which is $1.00 per transaction (+ more based on the payment amount)
• If your business is in the US, you can accept Wire payments through Stripe, which is $8.00 per transaction (+ more based on the payment amount)
• If you expect to accept recurring payments, Stripe will process them for free until you generate $1 million in payments – after which it’s 0.4% per recurring payment

There are also paid addons you may want to consider (which will add up to the monthly charges). Those are listed here.

Stripe Limitations

While being a solid payment processing solution, Stripe does have some limitations you should be aware of:

• Stripe doesn’t have an effective enough failed payment notification system for recurring payments (which can be solved with PayKickstart integration)
• Stripe has limitations when it comes to subscription management and complex billing. If you have a free trial and possible upgrades to other plans that also have free trial, you are likely to run into problems. Here’s a good example of challenges you may face
• Stripe won’t work with some businesses and models, which is not unique to Stripe but some banned businesses include “Get rich quick” e-books and multi-level marketing. The full list is here.

Stripe Payment Gateway Integration with PayKickstart

While being one of the leading payment processing solutions featuring an easier-than-most shopping cart solution, Stripe may require some development budget to integrate which may be a challenge, especially if you are just starting your store.

Stripe can be integrated through a “simple” API call. However if you are a non-tech-savvy entrepreneur and/or a small business owner, you may find yourself overwhelmed and intimidated by just scrolling through the Stripe API documentation.

Luckily, PayKickstart eliminates the need for any development budgets by giving you an easy way to integrate Stripe payment processing with your shopping cart.

With PayKickstart, Stripe integration takes just a few minutes.

Moreover, if you are running several products or campaigns inside PayKickstart, you can add several Stripe accounts within your single PayKickstart account.

To integrate Stripe, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Authenticate Stripe payment processing

Proceed to “Integrations” section inside PayKickstart and there click “Payment” and then “Add a payment gateway“

• Select Stripe from the list of Payment Gateways.
• Type an account display name (This is especially useful if you plan to integrate several Stripe accounts)
• Select the base currency
• Click “Connect” which will prompt you to authenticate your Stripe account

Step 2: Enable Stripe payments for your campaigns

Once you are done, proceed to your campaigns list and click “Edit” icon next to the campaign you want to enable Stripe for. There enable Stripe and save.

You are all set! You have created your own Stripe shopping cart (and it took you just a few clicks).

You can now use PayKickstart beautiful checkout design templates and popup widgets to accept online payments via Stripe:

Failed Payment Notifications for Stripe with PayKickstart

If you are running a subscription-based business, making sure that your customers are being billed is crucial for your revenue. As mentioned, Stripe can handle recurring payments but it has no good system in place for managing failed payments.

Why recurring payments may fail?

• Your customer’s card on file expires
• Your customer has no funds in the bank account on file
• Your customer’s back rejects the transaction for any reason

In most cases, you can recover the failed transaction if you properly notify the customer of the fail and help him/her update their card information (which is were Stripe fails).

PayKickstart Dunning / Subscription Saver feature will help you recover your customers’ failed payments by sending three emails to the customer before canceling the payment:

• Immediately after the failed rebill attempt,
• 3 days after,
• 5 days after

Stripe Payment Processing FAQ

If you’re new to Stripe, here’s a quick guide to help you out:

Why pick Stripe as your payment processing?

The Stripe shopping cart was created to help small business owners sell simple products easily. Stripe payment processing features include:

• A simplified checkout process that allows credit card payments
• The ability to sell digital media products from your website
• The ability to accept recurring (subscription) payments
• The option to collect billing and shipping information when selling physical products
• The ability to accept donations (for example, if you are creating a charity website)
• “Orders” menu where you can view everything that has been sold
• Receipt management: Stripe sends a receipt to your customers automatically
• An ability to accept payment directly. Unlike payment sites like PayPal, your customers will think that they’re paying you directly! No need to create an account or sign in.
• Stripe is easy to integrate in just about any CMS with an abundance of plugins and Shopify apps to use

Where does the money go?

All the payments go to your Stripe account. From there, you can have your funds sent to a bank account that you have linked to your Stripe account.

How to process refunds with Stripe?

If you need to process a refund for a customer for any reason, you can access the function directly on your Stripe dashboard or if you are using PayKickstart, you never have to go back to Stripe, as you can process a refund right from PayKickstart.

• Simply locate the customer in Stripe (via the email address they used) in the search bar in the top right corner (or in the Transactions UI of PayKickstart).
• Once in the customer’s page, scroll down to the Payment section.
• See the three little dots right there at the side? Click it and select “Refund payment…”

From there, you can process either a whole or a partial refund back to the customer. Just note that a refund may take up to 2-3 days to get back to the customer.

How to manage Stripe disputes and chargebacks?

PayKickstart automatically adds Stripe dispute and chargeback statuses inside your account, so you can handle them promptly. How you actually handle chargebacks depends on the unique circumstances around each order and the nature of the dispute.

In most cases, replying promptly to solve the issue will help you get things sorted out peacefully.

If a dispute is unsuccessfully challenged, you are responsible for both the dispute fee ($15.00) and the Stripe processing fee on the original payment.

How to import existing Stripe subscriptions into PayKickstart?

If you were using Stripe previously, you can easily import all your current subscriptions to PayKickstart by going to “Utilities” and from there to “Import Subscriptions”. There select Stripe as your Payment Gateway and the account where those subscriptions are located.

[Follow these steps to import Stripe subscriptions into PayKickstart]

Have you considered using Stripe to process online payments? Use PayKickstart to create your Stripe shopping card, with no development help required.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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