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E-commerce

Stripe

Portrait of Robert Klimant, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Robert KlimantCo-founder

What is Stripe?

Stripe is a payment processing and financial infrastructure company that provides APIs and tools for accepting payments online, managing subscriptions, running marketplaces, and handling related financial services like invoicing, fraud prevention, and tax calculation. Stripe is used by brands from solo founders to Amazon and Shopify, and it is one of the most common payment gateways in modern e-commerce stacks, including Medusa.js setups.

Why it matters

Stripe set the standard for what payment infrastructure should feel like to a developer and a finance team. Clean API. Honest pricing. A dashboard that doesn't require a manual. Other gateways exist and some are cheaper at high volume, but Stripe's product breadth — payments, subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Tax, Radar for fraud, Issuing — means most brands can run their entire money stack on one vendor. The trade is fee percentages that look fine at low volume and start to bite at scale. The brands that outgrow it usually move to Adyen or a hybrid. Until then, Stripe is the default for good reason.

How it works

Developers integrate Stripe through its API or pre-built UI components like Stripe Elements or Checkout. The storefront sends payment details directly to Stripe — never to the merchant's server — and receives a token in return. The server uses that token to charge the customer, set up a subscription, or attach a payment method to a saved customer. Stripe handles encryption, PCI scope, fraud screening, 3D Secure, and the bank-side routing. The dashboard exposes every transaction, refund, dispute, and payout. For subscriptions, Stripe Billing handles recurring charges and dunning. For marketplaces, Stripe Connect splits payments between platform and sellers automatically.

Related terms

  • Payment Gateway

    E-commerce

    The service that takes a shopper's card or wallet details at checkout, encrypts them, runs them through the card networks and banks, and tells the store…

  • Checkout Optimization

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    The work of making checkout faster, simpler, and harder to abandon — shorter forms, fewer steps, better payment options, and a flow that reassures shoppers…

  • Shopify

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    A hosted e-commerce platform that runs your storefront, payments, and checkout in one subscription — fast to launch, easy to use, and increasingly hard to…

  • Subscription Commerce

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    Selling products or services on a recurring schedule — weekly, monthly, quarterly — so customers re-order automatically and the business gets predictable…

  • Cart Abandonment

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    When a shopper adds products to their cart but then leaves the site before paying — the most expensive moment in e-commerce, where buyer intent meets friction…

  • Headless Commerce

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    An e-commerce setup where the storefront is built separately from the cart, checkout, and product engine, so the brand controls design and speed without ever…

  • Marketplace

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    A platform where many sellers list their products under one storefront — like Amazon, Etsy, or Zalando — with the marketplace handling discovery, payment,…