Payment Processing: Stripe vs Merchant Account Providers

Setup and Integration

Stripe vs merchant account; Stripe offers easy API integrations with developer-friendly documentation to help businesses start accepting payments, generally in a matter of hours or less. Traditional merchant account providers require longer setup with tedious documentation to establish an account with extensive paperwork—followed by its lengthy underwriting process which can take days or weeks.

Pricing Structure

Stripe offers flat-rate pricing and is transparent about their costs for most card payments, charging a rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Traditional merchant account providers often have varying interchange-plus pricing structures that can end up being cheaper for high-volume businesses, but these pricing structures generally include additional monthly costs, gateway fees, and, rental fees for payment processing equipment.

Features and Flexibility

Stripe also has the payment infrastructure that supports subscription billing, marketplace functionality, and international payment processing available in over 40 countries worldwide. Traditional commercial payment processors typically offer core payment processing capabilities with limited, or no, additional features. Any additional processing capabilities that a payment processor may support would generally require third-party integrations (or something more painful).

Customer Support

Traditional merchant account providers typically support customers with dedicated account managers and phone support on demand. Stripe's support is primarily email-based and includes a lot of documentation support, but is mostly technical documentation for developers. Risk Management Both Stripe and traditional merchant account providers offer fraud protection and the ability to manage payments risk and risk management. Traditionally, credit card processors may have more flexibility for working with high-risk accounts, and take into consideration their overall credit risk and back-end relationships with banks. Stripe has its own strict risk policies and will generally lock accounts faster once a dispute has occurred.