What is Stripe?

Get introduced to the course and Stripe API.

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Making payments through a site or mobile application in return for products or services has become increasingly common. Accordingly, many payment gateways simplify it for these sites and mobile apps to accept payments.

If you have an online business, you should definitely be thinking about using Stripe for processing your payments. If you are an individual developer, you should start integrating Stripe with your e-commerce projects.

If you are taking this course, you probably have some basic idea about Stripe. On the off chance that this is not the case, don’t stress too much as this course is your ultimate guide to learn everything about Stripe.

Stripe overview

To better understand what Stripe is, you should first know what a payment gateway is. On an e-commerce site or mobile app, you take the customer’s billing information and pass it along to a payment gateway. A payment gateway is an intermediary between the credit/debit card companies and the business account. The payment gateway confirms that the charge can be made for the given card information and sends the charge details to the business account. The same charge details are also passed to the app making the payment request.

Stripe is one of the prime payment gateways. It enables businesses and individuals to accept payments using their rich API and robust platform. Stripe makes it easier for business owners and vendors to start and manage their internet businesses by providing various payment solutions.

Features

  • Payments for business — Stripe provides a complete set of solutions to businesses and platforms that own e-commerce shops. These solutions allow them to manage subscription billing and enable them to accept payment through various channels.

  • Easy activation — Stripe onboarding is very user-friendly. You can create an account in minutes and get started with the libraries and SDKs to accept payment.

  • Optimized revenue — Stripe uses machine learning techniques to detect fraud and increase authorization rates for every transaction.

  • Global reach — Businesses can use different payment methods made available by Stripe to accept payment globally and increase the conversion rate significantly.

  • Developer-friendly — Stripe libraries and SDKs are production-build-ready and have excellent support for integration with legacy applications. By using the Stripe development platform, you can accept payments simply and focus more on customer and product experience.

Prerequisites for the course

This course assumes that you are skilled at JavaScript, React, NodeJS, and knows how MERN stack applications work and how to get them running on your local machine. If you are not adept at these technologies, please continue learning, and take this course after you are comfortable with them. This course is designed for candidates who want to learn about Stripe SDKs and libraries (both client and server) to enable payments in their apps and expand their skill set.

Getting a Stripe account

Setting up a Stripe account is fairly straightforward.

First, go to https://stripe.com and click on the Start now button.

Next, you will be taken to the register page, where you need to enter relevant details and click on the Create Account button.

Finally, you will have access to your test dashboard. You can find your developer API keys here and view transactions, customers, reports, etc. Remember to verify your email so that Stripe does not restrict your account.

Note that your account is not yet activated for accepting real payments, and only has access to test mode.