E-commerce has provided customers with a convenient and affordable way of purchasing products while enabling businesses to reduce operating expenses while expanding their customer base. However, payment gateways have emerged to be the fulcrum on which the entire E-commerce system is balanced.

This is because payment gateways provide the infrastructure for processing payments for goods sold in online stores. And while there are many payment service providers (PSP) available in the market, Stripe, PayPal, and PAYBATS are some of recommended E-commerce payment gateways meant for online SMEs.

A comparison of other e-payment systems

As PSPs, Stripe and PayPal have several similarities and differences. Both Stripe and PayPal have the same transaction fee of 2.9% or above on each transaction, however they charge zero set up fee and monthly fees, require no contracts, and facilitate both billing and invoice as well as E-commerce payment processing.

On the other hand, PayPal differs from Stripe in that it has a much larger user base of over 420 million active users spread across 200 countries while Stripe is limited to just about 47 countries. When it comes to available payment modes, Stripe is more robust than the PayPal platform. Unfortunately, both of PayPal and Stripe are not familiar on local market, especially South East Asia market.

PayPal primarily supports a limited number of credit cards like Mastercard, Visa, and American Express. The other side of Stripe supports majority of the credit and debit cards available globally as well as a wide range of e-wallets from Google Pay and Microsoft Pay to WeChat, Amex Express, and Visa Checkout. Obviously, Paypal and Stripe have majority service coverage over American States and Europe countries, instead of Asia countries.