One of the questions we hear all of the time doing support for WooCommerce is “what payment gateway do you recommend?” There's a lot of payment gateways out there – currently there's 111 available for WooCommerce – so picking one can be intimidating. I've used several payment gateways both for myself and doing work for clients and have had to jump over a few hurdles. Now that I've had to painfully learn the flaws of other gateways I'm a huge fan of Stripe. At this point I doubt I would use anything else.
Reasons to Use Stripe
Easy to Setup
One of the best things about Stripe is that you can set up an account and test it right away. You don't need a live account until the day you launch. You can do all of your testing with the free test account which is very easy to setup (just an email & password).
Excellent (Human) Support
I actually did have a problem with with of my Stripe accounts and I only found out after we collected thousands of dollars and we noticed they weren't being deposited into a bank account. If you've never misplaced thousands of dollars for a client let me give you an idea of how upset they were:
Hulk out!
Photo Credit: Rooners Toy Photography
Well the good news here is that I was able to contact Stripe and one of the their helpful representatives let me know that the client provided an incorrect bank routing number. After alerting the client to this issue they had the money in their bank account in 24 hours. I can only wonder how long it would have taken me to learn that the bank routing number was in an incorrect format with a different payment gateway.
Simple Pricing
If you're trying to convince a client to choose Stripe it's so nice that they have simple pricing. Simple affordable and on par with other gateways.
Well Documented API
If you ever need to do any custom work with Stripe you'll want a nice API to work with. I've worked with other APIs and I can tell you they're no where near as well documented. This means that development takes longer overall and bugs take exponentially longer to figure out. At WooThemes we've actually taken some functionality out of plugins due to trying to implement undocumented APIs that were randomly generating bugs which were of course a nightmare to debug.
Simple Wins
If you're seeing a pattern here it's that Stripe is unbelievably simple and easy to work with. If you're dealing with thousands of dollars why would you want something complex? I want a simple system that doesn't break and is well supported. Stripe does all that beautifully.