It can be developed to allow customers to sign up to an online subscription service – an example would be a client of ours who sell advertising accounts on their website at a monthly rate.

They work with the health and beauty industry throughout the UK, their model works by each customer creating an account to then post up adverts for their business and services.

Stripe here allows them to create their account and do as much preparation and orientation as they need to before they post their first advert up to go live. Only at this stage does it charge them. Meaning they never pay a penny until they post their first advert. Through Strip we were able to manage this system quite effectively and easily.

Once they pay to post their first ad they are then subscribed and are re-billed automatically once a month until they request to cancel their subscription.

We have also worked with Stripe to perform more complex tasks, many of these are covered by data protection and non-disclosure agreements so we can’t tell you specific client names but we can tell you what they needed doing and what the made Stripe do for them.

One previous client needed a rising service level subscription in place where clients could sign up to a lower level plan and at will upgrade themselves to a more comprehensive plan as and when they wanted. This would allow our client to set up their site and allow clients to manage their own accounts without the requirement to create a large customer service department with several dozen people manning phones to deal with upgrades and downgrades. This was a simple solution with some slightly complex coding to make work but nevertheless, it achieved what our client wanted.

Simple online payments can be taken through Stripe too, however Stripe has the very helpful option of allowing customers to save their card details with you which means that you will not have to rely on your website’s database to save that data. Saving you the security headache and legal framework required to hold card details! This in turn means that returning customers can take advantage of “one click purchase” buttons and be more likely to use your site in the future!

If your site or system requires a more complex system, then Stripe can be adapted to this too. One such site required customers to create their own accounts and receive money from other users on the site. The site itself would then take a cut and automatically transfer the remainder of the money to the customer. This required a complex calculation algorithm especially as they wanted to display a customer dashboard to allow people to see the total money they had received for their campaign.

Although relatively new to the payment gateway scene, Stripe has become the fast-growing payment gateway, coming up only second to the giant PayPal. Cheaper than PayPal, more flexible and designed around subscriptions, repeat payments and simple checkouts, it has become a firm favourite of ours.

Databases and marketplaces can be as complex as you like, generally there’s a way to adapt Stripe to work with your requirements and perform the tasks required of it. No matter how ambitious your idea, if your website needs to earn you money, Stripe could be the best solution for you!

There is so much to discuss on this subject that we could go on for pages, but we would suggest if you’re still on the fence to contact us. We can discuss your needs and your individual business intricacies to determine what might be the best way for you to reach your audience.