Stripe hits Canada with online payment service

Stripe Aims to Reinvent Online Payments in Canada

- Backed by PayPal Founders, Stripe responds to customer demand for expansion -

 

SAN FRANCISCO, September 19, 2012 – Stripe, the company redefining how to best accept payments on the Internet, is today opening its service to Canadian entrepreneurs and businesses who eagerly awaited their international expansion.

 

Founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, former MIT and Harvard University students, Stripe’s goal is straightforward: to make it easy for large businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, non-profits, and everything in between to accept payments from anywhere in the world. Since launching in September 2011, Stripe has earned accolades from developers around the world and secured $38 million in funding. Investors include Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz, along with PayPal founders Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin. Last month, Stripe announced that Peter Thiel had increased his investment in Stripe by $5 million.

 

“Stripe came about because we were so dissatisfied with how hard it was to accept payments online and build a business on the Internet," said Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and CEO. "Lengthy waits, onerous requirements, and antiquated technology have been holding back the Internet economy. Stripe makes it simple for any company to sell to anyone, anywhere in the world.”

 

Co-founder, John Collison, added, “Stripe removes one of the biggest hurdles to starting an online business in Canada. For the first time, any businesses in Canada will easily be able to accept credit card payments without compromising on their customers’ experience. We’re excited to see what Canadians will create using our service.”

 

Why Stripe is Winning Praise

One area in which Stripe succeeds is by making it easy for businesses to accept payments on the Internet while still controlling their customers’ experience. Avi Bryant, founder of Vancouver, BC-based DabbleDB, which was acquired by Twitter in 2010, said, “It took us months of phone calls and faxes to get approved for a merchant account and set up payment integration, and even then we were never happy with the tools and APIs available to us.”

 

E-commerce sites looking to avoid a merchant account setup can opt for a third party payment provider; however, these providers whisk consumers off to their site to complete a transaction, adding steps to the process and reducing the retailer’s control over the customer experience.

 

With Stripe, entrepreneurs and businesses can easily sign up for an account, enter a few lines of JavaScript into their site’s source code, and with that, their website is ready to accept payments. After consumers enter their credit card information on the business’ website, the payment information goes straight to Stripe’s secure servers, so site owners don’t have to worry about storing sensitive data. Stripe then processes the payment and the business gets a deposit in its bank account.

 

As with the rest of Stripe, pricing is simple and predictable. Stripe charges one simple fee of 2.9 percent plus 30¢ CAD per successful transaction. Unlike other online payment processing systems, Stripe doesn’t charge setup fees, monthly fees, or require lengthy contracts, making it more cost-effective for businesses of all sizes to transact online. Stripe also provides a beautiful dashboard to track everything from payments to coupons to deposits to customers.

 

To a consumer, a Stripe-powered website contains a familiar on-page checkout form. This elegant integration, previously unavailable to all but those companies with the resources necessary to build a complex payment system, allows businesses to design the customer’s online shopping experience from start to finish.

 

How Canadians are Using Stripe

Stripe works with many successful brands in the U.S. including foursquare and MoMa and many Canadian businesses have been using Stripe over the summer. Companies like Tarsnap, MetaLab, and Shopify, have all been excited to see their businesses thrive with Stripe.

 

Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies headquartered in Ottawa, described his experiences. “The first time I dealt with online payments was when I opened my online snowboard store here in Canada. My only option was to go through my bank. It took months of pleading and convincing. By the time we could accept payments, we had spent thousands of dollars for unnecessary security audits and we were sitting on unsold inventory.”

 

Lütke continued, “Like Stripe, we believe that companies of all sizes should have all the tools they need to run a successful business. We got hooked on offering Stripe’s services to our customers because they understand how simple it can be – and should be – for businesses to grow and transact online. For Canadians, this means more choice for purchasing a variety of products and services from businesses which are now able to operate online. Americans have been enjoying Stripe for a while and I'm thrilled that it's finally available for Canadian businesses and startups.”

 

Andrew Wilkinson, founder of award-winning design studio MetaLab based in Victoria, BC, shared his views after using Stripe’s beta. “Credit card processing in Canada is still in the dark ages. Getting setup with our old payment gateway took months of frustrating applications and phone calls, and came with a barrage of fees and startup costs. Stripe has been a breath of fresh air. It took us less than a minute to get set up and start accepting payments. The old guard should be quaking in their boots.”

 

Colin Percival, founder of Tarsnap, also a Stripe beta user believes, “Stripe makes all the problems of credit card processing go away. It took only a few minutes to sign up; it was easy to integrate into my website;  and the pricing is straightforward. Unlike Paypal, they trust me to decide if I want to accept a payment and, most importantly, when I need help, I can send an email and get a reply from them in a matter of minutes. I can't imagine why a small business starting up now and needing to accept credit cards online would want to use anything other than Stripe.”

 

About Stripe

Stripe is the best way to accept payments on the Internet. With Stripe, entrepreneurs and businesses alike can easily create their own secure payment experiences without having to invest in a costly infrastructure. By providing innovative tools and systems for transacting online, Stripe aims to build the economic infrastructure for the Internet.