Stripe is Growing Up -

When it came to selling anything online, the industry standard for many years has been PayPal.

Its roots are with eBay, PayPal is very popular with the public. In fact, they have the Super Bowl commercial!

Due to the market dominance of PayPal, many online shopping cart providers (both in the WordPress space as well as elsewhere) have created PayPal an option, for free payment option for their customers.

The WordPress Learning Management System is similar to this: If you want to sell your classes using PayPal it is as easy as adding your email address.

In the past, numerous attempts have been made to challenge PayPal but without much successes.

I remember the days of "StormPay", among others. If you haven't heard of StormPay you're not without a good reason - they are not in operation anymore.

However, in the last few time, a rival to PayPal dominance has emerged: Stripe.

Some say that Stripe feels "less and less bloated". Also, it has been claimed that it's more developer friendly, making it easy to use for the commerce component of apps.

Stripe Meets WordPress

Due to its simplicity of use, it wasn't long before Stripe to make its debut into the world of WordPress.

Many of the major shopping cart providers made it available as a payment processor that was premium. This made sense given that Stripe (at at one point) was relatively new and only had limited usage throughout the world.

However, today the landscape is distinct.

Its popularity is steadily increasing in other countries and is often the method used to accept payment (in certain cases, over PayPal).

Due to their explosive growth there has been a shift in the way applications incorporate the technology into their offerings.

The shopping cart iThemes Exchange introduced Stripe as an optional add-on that was free during its infancy, being among the first (to my understanding) to make this happen. In recent times, the most well-known WordPress eCommerce plugin (WooCommerce) has decided to offer their Stripe add-on for free as well.

I believe it's safe to say we'll see this pattern continue to be seen across numerous areas.

Choose between Stripe or PayPal - Which one should you choose?

If you're in one of those countries Stripe has a presence in, you could be wondering which one to make use of.

Whether your selling an online course or a physical product , my advice is to utilize both.

PayPal is still a great alternative to offer your customers. The majority of people feel confident using PayPal and there is nothing wrong with removing the security.

However, don't be surprised to see that the PayPal customers will be in the minority. A lot of people will opt for Stripe (i.e. credit card) as their method of payment.