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Comment by rwieruch | Hacker News Reader

Stripe whenever it's possible. However, without PayPal one is missing a bug chunk of people who cannot pay with credit card. Hence, I offer both. Since I implemented both (again) over the last month, here a list of my resources:

- Stripe Elements [0] + Stripe Webhook [1]

- Stripe Checkout [2] + Stripe Webhook [1]

- PayPal Smart Payment Buttons [3]

And one repository:

- basic Stripe Checkout with Webhook in React + Express [4]

Personally I preferred Stripe Checkout over Elements, because they take care about the look and feel.

- 0 https://github.com/stripe/react-stripe-elements

- 1 https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks

- 2 https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout

- 3 https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/

- 4 https://github.com/rwieruch/react-express-stripe

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Could you elaborate a bit for which reasons you prefer Stripe over PayPal and why it makes sense to offer both? I am currently trying to decide on a payment service but having a hard time making a sensible decision. The way I understand it PayPal supports more countries and may thus be accessible to more customers. Fees between Stripe and PayPal seem to be identical for US transactions; for international transactions things tend to get more complicated.

Not op, but my 2 cents.

Stripe's developer UX is godly, from api docs to the dashboard it's something all B2B companies that offer APIs should aspire to.

Secondly, with stripe elements it can be styled into the website much nicer than PayPal buttons.

PayPal does support more countries and still has some brand recognition with customers as "a safe way to pay online", but between the bad UX for both business and developer, as well as their tendency to randomly freeze accounts, we try to dissuade clients away from it unless it's a significant revenue stream.

> Secondly, with stripe elements it can be styled into the website much nicer than PayPal buttons.

Seriously, does anybody care about the style used on a website when making a payment?

Also, as a user, I'd rather see a single consistent style so I have some confirmation about what bank I'm dealing with.

> Seriously, does anybody care about the style used on a website when making a payment?

Stakeholders tend to.

Style may have been a poor choice of wording, as I meant the workflow as well as aesthetics. Keeping the user on the site and having complete control of the checkout process can lead to better conversion rates and up-selling than throwing them to a payment provider and maybe getting them sent back.

> as a user, I'd rather see a single consistent style so I have some confirmation about what bank I'm dealing with

Which is one of the reasons I listed to include PayPal, as the logo is well recognised.

Having a disjointed UI is a huge risk of dropping conversions. So yeah, it does matter.

Keeping it short: Stripe's API is just a dream from a developer's perspective and I don't agree with many things PayPal as a company did in the past. However, as you mentioned, PayPal reaches a wider audience world wide than Stripe. Also even though people would be able to use Stripe from a customer perspective, for many there is still this familiarity with PayPal I guess.

I forgot about this one, but if you want to see a full integration of Stripe and PayPal with a React checkout form, head over here [0]. Working on this right now :)

[0] https://github.com/rwieruch/nextjs-firebase-authentication

>Personally I preferred Stripe Checkout over Elements, because they take care about the look and feel.

Stripe Checkout force you to gave client email to stripe. With Elements you can just use stripe for card processing (with zipcode of course).

Stripe checkout handles sending a receipt though iirc? So it's not like the email is winding up on a shadowy marketing list run by them.

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