Author: Claudia Amand

As Shoeboxed's Marketing & PR Manager, Claudia focuses on maintaining a positive relationship with the media and engaging users with the Shoeboxed product. She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in Public Relations.

PayPal vs. Stripe: Which Payment Solution is Best for Your Small Biz?

When you run an online business you may not know which payment solution to go with. We created this guide to help you decide which solution is easiest for your customers to use.

If you run an online business, you need to accept payments. But getting paid via an online portal has all kinds of challenges. You need to make sure your solution is secure, functional, and easy for customers to use.

You can have a web payment solution custom built for your site, but software solutions have already solved the biggests challenges, and you can buy their services for a reasonable price. Two of the most popular are PayPal and Stripe. Websites around the world accept payments from these two companies.

Today, we’re going to explore PayPal and Stripe. We compare the two on a number of factors– fees, security, APIs, and more, to help you discover which payment solution is best for your site.

What do PayPal and Stripe do?

PayPal and Stripe both accept credit card payments online and in mobile apps. Both solutions can be seamlessly integrated with an existing website. The two aren’t new to this game– they process billions of dollars every year, are two of the most trusted solutions for accepting mobile payment.

What’s the Deal with PayPal?

PayPal was founded in 1998 by Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Ken Howery under the name Confinity. In 2000, Confinity merged with X.com, Elon Musk’s online banking company. Soon enough, X.com would focus exclusively on PayPal, which was generating significant interest and respect.

PayPal had its IPO and was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, and became eBay’s default payment solution. Today, PayPal operates all over the world. It has become an independent company again, spinning off from Ebay. PayPal moved $228 Billion dollars in 2014 alone.

What About Stripe?

Stripe is much newer than PayPal, as it was founded in 2010. Founders Patrick Collison and John Collison created Stripe as a turn-key solutions for web developers who wanted to integrate payment processing into their websites. Stripe stands out from the competition because of how easy it is for software programmers to use.

Stripe received funding from Y Combinator in June 2010, and quickly grew. In 2014, Stripe landed a major partnership with Apple Inc. to help power Apple Pay.

Pros to Paypal and Stripe

  • Easy to use for non-coders
  • Extremely secure and the security isn’t on you
  • Customizable to your brand

Cons to PayPal and Stripe

  • Transaction fee charges
  • Not designed for brick-and-mortar locations

Paypal_Stripe Infographic_Shoeboxed

Other Web Payment Solutions to Check Out

PayPal and Stripe are two favoured payment solutions, but there are others that may better fit your needs. Here are a few worth checking out:

Authorize.net

Authorize.net is a comprehensive payment solution, allowing you to accept payments online, via mobile, or at a store. Authorize.net is a very high quality payment gateway, and the 24/7 support is unrivalled. Your customers can use any credit card, or even use PayPal.

Fees: 2.9% 30¢ transaction costs, $49 setup fee, plus $25 recurring charge

Square

Square is the best option for brick-and-mortar shops and in person transactions. You can accept every way your customers want to pay– chip cards, NFC payments, and MagStripe cards are all accepted. Square can instantly turn your smartphone or tablet into a cash register.

Fees: 2.75% per swipe or paid Square Invoice, 3.5% + 15¢ per manually entered transaction

Braintree

Braintree is a simple, robust way to accept payments or enable buying from almost anywhere — in your mobile app or online. On top of the full breadth of PayPal and Venmo customers, Braintree’s integrations give you access to multiple payment methods, simple pricing, security, and customer support.

Fees: Your first $50K in standard card processing volume comes fee-free. This applies to all card and digital wallet transactions not through PayPal or Coinbase. After you reach $50K, it’s 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, with discounted rates available for businesses who process over $80k per month.

Recurly

Recurly is a payment solution specifically for subscription-based businesses. It cates to enterprise-level business, so isn’t a great choice for the little guys. Recurly is easy to use, and doesn’t require a massive integration effort.

Fees: 1.25% of revenue + 10¢ per transaction, Core Plan monthly fee is $99, Professional Plan monthly fee is $299.

Dwolla

Dwolla isn’t a typical payment gateway. It specializes in securely connecting with U.S. banks and credit unions to enable safe, fast, bank transfers. This is great if you’re constantly using bank wires.

Fees: No transaction fees for sending and receiving one-time, recurring, or mass payments. If you want to access Dwolla’s advanced features, you’ll need to contact the sales team.

This guest post was written by John Stevens, the CEO of Hostingfacts.com, a web hosting review site that boasts human edited and tested reviews of hosting companies from around the world.  He enjoys building websites, as well as experimenting with design and UX. 

[Update] Direct Download for Reports is Now Available!

We have now added a Direct Download button for expense reports in the Reports section, allowing you to save custom reports directly to your computer.

You asked and here it is!

We have now added a Direct Download button for expense reports in the “Reports” section of our web app. This will allow you to save and access custom reports directly to your computer. You no longer have to email an expense report as an attachment before saving and downloading it!

Direct Download
Download reports directly to your computer as a PDF or Excel file without having to email an attachment first.

What does this mean for you?

Instead of having to open your inbox and access the report from an email message, you can simply create the report and save it straight to your computer, bypassing the old email attachment process.

If you do need to email the report to someone (or to yourself), we didn’t completely remove the email option. It’s in the form of an optional check box next to the “Generate and download” button.

The added direct download functionality is the latest update to the new Reports section – a simple but powerful page in your account dashboard that lets you create custom-built summaries of expenses with just a few clicks of a button.

In addition to being able to directly download new reports, you can also view a list of past reports and download them straight to your account.

Past Reports
View and download old reports straight to your computer.

We hope the new Reports section and the updated direct download functionality make it even easier to manage your expenses.

As always, we value your feedback. If you have thoughts or questions about the direct download update, please let us know in the comments section below, or let us know how we can improve our reports automation by filling out this quick survey!

[Update] The All-New Overview Dashboard

We’re excited to bring you news of the latest update to Shoeboxed’s web app: an all-new Overview dashboard!

We’re excited to bring you news of the latest update to Shoeboxed’s web app: an all-new Overview dashboard!

So what’s different about the new Overview page? We’re glad you asked. You can now:

View receipts in compact time windows
Toggle between receipts from the current month, previous month, current year and previous year in the same window without refreshing the page. In other words, you won’t be taken to the receipts page whenever you want to switch date periods. Comparing expenses from different time frames takes a second!

Shoeboxed Update Overview Page
View receipts in compact time windows

Create instant expense reports
Automatically build custom expense reports directly from the overview page based on time period and category using our brand new Reports section. In addition to cutting even more time from creating expense reports and bypassing the old manual process, these new “quick reports” will help you analyze and better understand your spending habits based off category and month.

Shoeboxed Overview page Update 2
Create instant expense reports

View and categorize uncategorized receipts
If you have any receipts that are uncategorized for a given time period, the overview page will automatically notify you. From there, you can click “view and categorize” receipts to label and organize uncategorized receipts under the correct category.

Shoeboxed Overview page update 3
View and categorize uncategorized receipts

See total amount of spending by time period, broken down by category

Shoeboxed Overview Update 4
See total amount of spending by time period, broken down by category

We hope these new overview page updates make it even easier and faster for you to keep track of your receipts. Excited about any of these new features or didn’t see anything you were anticipating? Comment below!