I’m not really sure this is the best place to ask this question, but I figure it’s a start.
Can anyone provide me with a decent link/course for understanding how to use the payment provider Stripe? More and more of my clients are now asking me to set up payment processes with them, but I really I know very little about the software or how things should be set up.
I guess I’m looking for a Stripe 101 - does that exist?
Thanks a lot,
What exactly do your clients want you to do? For you to accept cards? or offer them direct debit for subscriptions? do invoicing? send them payment links? or integrate web checkout into your website?
There are so many services by Stripe it is hard to give a concise answer. Do spend some time on their website though. They have good information and provide use cases and examples.
Hey @simonsmark - thanks a lot for the reply.
Clients range from content providers (like Medium/ConvertKit etc) to more “official” clients whom I’m offering consultancy services to.
All of them are just sending me links to sign into Stripe and set up payment processes - and I just don’t like this idea of “following instructions” when I’m sure I could be managing my overall Stripe account more efficiently - which is why I would just like to properly understand the 101 stuff.
Thanks a lot in advance
I agree with @simonsmark — it really depends on what, precisely, you are trying to do. Stripe was originally built for web developers to add credit card payment processing to web sites, and their help maintains that developer-heavy feeling. I find a lot of impenetrable.
However, I use Stripe for all of my clients whose sites are built on Squarespace, and it’s quite easy to set it up because Squarespace has built the tools to connect to Stripe.
(And FWIW, if you’re doing online sales, you need two pieces of tech: the shopping cart/inventory system, and the credit card processor. Stripe only does the latter, so you’ll need to find the shopping cart code elsewhere. In the above example, Squarespace provides the shopping cart/inventory software.0)
Stripe now offers in-person credit card processing (it originally was online-only credit card processing; these are two very different services!), and that’s an entirely different system to set up.
For my few clients who take credit cards in person, I use Square, not Stripe. They were the first and still probably are the easiest to set up. If Stripe’s offerings catch up, I may switch them away from Square, just to simply the accounting.
We use Stripe through Zoho Invoice for all our billing, all I did was sign up for an account and added the unique ID generated to the invoicing system. If your going to use it to accept payments for say goods on a website you are as has been mentioned going to need to integrate it into an eCommerce solution of some sort.