San Francisco-based online payments startup Stripe expanded to the U.K. Thursday.
Stripe enables companies to accept credit and debit card payments online. Companies integrate a couple of lines of Stripe code on their websites in order to use the service. Stripe offers code in Ruby, PHP and Python, among others, for a quick integration. Toolkits are also available for native Android and iPhone apps as well for a number of third-party plugins and libraries for WordPress and Drupal.
U.K. users get the same instant activation as provided in the U.S. and Canada, where the company is already active, said Andy Young of Stripe U.K. in a blog post. All major credit-card types are supported and U.K. businesses will be able to charge customers in U.S. dollars, British pounds and euros, he said, adding that conversions will be handled automatically by Stripe.
Pricing in the U.K. starts at a 2.4 percent transaction fee, plus £0.20 ($0.31) per transaction, plus VAT. In the U.S., Stripe charges 2.9 percent, plus $0.30 per successful charge.
The service has no setup fees, no monthly fees, no refund fees and no card storage fees. It doesn’t charge for failed payments.
“We’re continuing to work on bringing Stripe to more businesses worldwide,” wrote Young, adding that the company opened an engineering office in London. “We’re already at work on the next countries and we’re hiring globally.”
Stripe is not the only company offering an easily embeddable payments service. It faces competition in Europe from Paymill and Braintree, which offer similar easy-to-integrate payment services.