Stripe Vs Square: Which Payment Gateway Should You Use In 2020?
The main players in the payment gateway sector are constantly evolving and can therefore become number one. After all, there are more eCommerce store owners than ever today, and they all need a reliable way to collect payments from customers. Two of the most established payment gateway options on the market today are Stripe and Square. Both provide businesses with easy ways to process payments made online, cutting-edge technology and many e-commerce tools to simplify things for online store owners trying to run and make business money.
Stripe and Square have their own unique features designed to meet very different needs. And quite frankly, it can make choosing the payment gateway to use more difficult than you would like. That’s why we’re going to do a comparison between Stripe and Square, so you can make a data-driven decision for your small business.
Stripe Vs Square: What Are They Doing?
Stripe was founded in 2011 and is a payment gateway that allows you to accept credit card payments (in person or online) by transferring money between your merchant account and a payment processor. This is done using a physical credit card terminal or an online processor. Stripe has a cloud-based infrastructure designed for reliability, scalability and security. Not to mention the fact that it is very developer-centric, works for corporate sites and applications, and is grounded in both code and design.
In addition, Stripe can be used as a standalone solution for those who need to send invoices and collect payments for products or services. While it’s not the most common way to use Stripe, since most people integrate it into ecommerce sites, it’s another way to use this flexible and powerful payment gateway. Square, on the other hand, is a little older (founded in 2009) and is not technically a payment gateway. In fact, it is more like an end-to-end high risk payment processor or a virtual terminal. In addition, unlike Stripe, which can be used on any compatible platform, square is not a standalone payment gateway solution. Instead, it is part of a larger e-commerce solution.
This software is extremely versatile because it essentially transforms your customers’ devices into portable point-of-sale terminals. For this reason, you will often discover that the core product of Square is actually its in-person point of sale system. It allows merchants to collect payments from customers by reading bank cards using a smart device or manually entering card information (in person or by phone).
That said, over the years, Square has taken the lead in competing with established companies like Stripe. In fact, you can now use Square to easily collect payments from customers who buy from your online store. Setting up a Stripe payment experience on your site ranges from super simple to super complex, depending on what you need your payment gateway to do. And it turns out that this is one of the selling points of Stripe.
The developer-centric approach gives you the flexibility to create a personalized payment process for customers. With Stripe Elements, you guarantee your customers rapid and correct entry of their information thanks to real-time validation, dynamic localization, automatic filling functionality and improved formatting and masking. Like Stripe, Square does not charge a registration fee and does not lock you into any type of contract. In addition, they boast of not having other types of hidden fees such as authorization, statement, reimbursement, PCI compliance, business card, etc. Stripe also supports more than 135 different currencies, so reaching international customers will never be a problem. The only downside to using Stripe is that there is currently no way for you to accept payments in person.
