Stripe or PayPal? Or Both?
While most of our Shopify clients use our services to build cool Shopify stores, almost all require advice & direction on multiple other areas of e-commerce. One of the most important decisions a store owner will make during the store build is the choice of payment gateway. Bizarrely, this is a decision often made at the end of the build cycle and close to launch.
Your payment gateway is key to store success and gives you the ability to accept credit cards securely. Each time you accept an order, the processing of that order will incur a cost. Nowadays customers are tech savvy and they’ll research your store security policy and gateway used. If it’s not up to scratch, you may very well lose sales.
Shopify integrates with over 70 payment gateways to accept credit cards. If you live in the US, Canada or the UK, Shopify has it's own gateway built on Stripe.
As Shopify store owner this simply means you can plug your Shopify store into a great range of gateways. Essentially you only need one on your store to get up and running.
PayPal is now one of the most popular gateways. Paypal is trusted by millions of users all over the world. If you are launching an online store you should consider PayPal. In addition, PayPal acts as digital wallet enabling your customer to make payments in your store without a card. But most of all, PayPal is easy to register and add to your Shopify store. A Paypal icon on the footer of your new store will add trust. It will also drive sales as many users now only use their Paypal account to purchase online.
After you've placed Paypal on your Shopify store, there are multiple other options such as Realex. However, we advise all store owners to consider taking advantage of Stripe. Stripe is easy to join, simple to link to your store and enables you to add a gateway with no paperwork.
By adding both of these gateways to your store, you are providing two options for your customers. Upon checkout, the customer chooses their preferred method. If they choose PayPal they will check out via their PayPal account. if not, the transaction will be processed by Stripe.
The full list of available Gateways is here.
Peter@milkbottlelabs.com
