One of the best features of Stripe was actually "invented" by Braintree - https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/client-side-enc... https://www.braintreepayments.com/docs/javascript

What's great about this is it allows you to host all your payment pages and post them back to your server for processing/validation, without having to worry about PCI compliance apart from the most basic level as you never touch the credit card details.

Although GoCardless is great, it's not the same as a Stripe. Direct debits don't offer immediate transfer of funds[0] (they take a few days) which limits its suitability for a lot of e-commerce applications. As someone else mentioned, the lack of refunds is also an issue.

That said, for service invoicing, subscriptions, etc it's fantastic.

[0] https://gocardless.com/direct_debit

To the best of my knowledge, you can't handle refunds through the GoCardless API, you have to arrange a BACS transfer by other means. My experience working with e-commerce is that refunds happen so frequently that this presents a massive hurdle to using GoCardless.

That's a very good idea but unfortunately it can only be used by UK clients.