Online Sales an Opportunity for Companies, Customers

Q: How would you describe the way Stripe adapts to enterprises around the world?

A: Stripe is a tech company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. It was founded in 2011 and since then, it has been focusing on helping companies sell and move money online. Prior to Stripe’s emergence, this process could be painful for companies, which had to find different partners or service providers to help conduct their business. Now, with one single platform, companies can accept payments in less than five minutes.

The number of businesses on Stripe in Latin America grew five times over the course of the pandemic. Last year, each day, 1,400 new companies and 100 nonprofits joined us. In 2021, businesses on Stripe processed over US$640 billion in payments globally and more than 100 businesses a day passed the milestone of US$1 million in lifetime sales on Stripe.

Stripe solves many problems common to online sales. When organizations sell online, they try to minimize friction and Stripe has the capabilities to make the checkout more effective. One of the main pain points of selling online, particularly in Mexico, is fraud. Stripe has a built-in machine learning solution to help merchants minimize fraud. The beauty here is having the ability to integrate everything into a single platform and sell not only in Mexico but globally in a matter of minutes. 

Our clean and well-documented APIS made Stripe compelling and popular. Given Stripe’s success in helping merchants accept payments and minimize fraud, large companies are also reaching out. These large organizations want to ally with a company that offers them the global infrastructure to accept payments and more. 

Q: What elements of your value proposition attracted industry giants like Ford, Amazon and Spotify?

A: Having a payments processor that is really robust ensures companies have higher reliability. Stripe has an availability factor of 99.99 percent. We also have all the payment methods that are typically relevant to specific markets, which is attractive to companies that want to tap a new demographic. Besides our software as a service (SaaS) platform, we can act as a local partner for a global company.

We can ensure higher authorization rates and lower fraud rates when it comes to payments. Our machine learning tool detects fraudulent payments and stops them from going through. We also allow merchants to leverage subscription-based products. By using SaaS, sellers do not need to code. Anyone with basic technical knowledge can log onto the dashboard and enable these functionalities with a few clicks.

Q: Could you share with us other success stories?

A: Homely, a B2B SaaS startup from Mexico which works as a marketplace for cleaning services, has been our partner since 2017. It chose Stripe Payments to process transactions, integrate different payment methods, easily payout their "keepers," and protect them from online fraud and charge end-clients using Homely as a subscription product.

GAIA chose Stripe Payments to consolidate its payment platforms, gain deep visibility into the customer experience and deliver a seamless payment experience to its growing customer base. It also added Stripe Radar to continue fighting fraud using algorithms that quickly adapt to changes in global fraud patterns without blocking payments from legitimate customers. By implementing our solutions, GAIA experienced a 9 percent increase in conversion rates and 2.5 percent reduction in false fraud positives.

We are also partners of Ben & Frank, which had limited fraud monitoring and payment reporting with its previous provider. This prevented it from continuously optimizing authorization performance. With us, Ben & Frank experienced a 10 percent increase in conversion in just three months of using Stripe in Mexico, compared to their previous processor.

Agua Bendita, a swimwear brand, approached us because it wanted to grow its presence outside Colombia. Stripe’s strong global presence gave Agua Bendita the capability to process cards and transactions across borders, allowing the brand to boost international sales outside Colombia. As a result, Agua Bendita grew two times in online sales in one year. Currently, 70 percent of its overall payments are processed by Stripe and 80 percent of its online sales are international.

Q: What role have payment platforms played in developing the e-commerce market and what do you see as the main obstacles to their momentum?

A: During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone recognized the importance of having a strong, sustainable digital presence. For that, companies need a reliable partner. When we launched the company, we wanted to simplify all payments, which is relevant to all markets but essential in Mexico, given its fraud rates.

We are a technology company in a payment ecosystem. Our goal is to ensure that when a company decides to work with Stripe, the integration feels as seamless as possible. We are proud of our APIs and have strong partnerships with most of the e-commerce platforms. Once a company starts using Stripe, we want to help them scale up their business, ensure higher authorization rates, lower fraud rates and the best-in-class support system. We work to ensure that we have the most robust solution in the market for merchants.

Q: Stripe uses tools like machine learning to help users increase their revenue. How does this process work and what other related technologies are emerging?

A:  When someone swipes a credit card, there are many variables that are analyzed in milliseconds. For every purchase, Stripe will analyze the card holder, how long they browsed, their card and authentication details, among other parameters, always respecting privacy laws, to determine whether the transaction should be allowed.

The merchant can also apply their own risk adversity parameters. Sellers of goods are at a higher risk than subscription-based companies because if the transaction is fraudulent, the merchant loses the product and the revenue. It is key to allow these merchants to include their know-how in the process because they know which transactions are more likely to be fraudulent. Stripe’s Radar solution enables the merchant to put in their own set of rules.

We offer many other tools to ensure higher authorization rates while preventing fraud. For example, Stripe leverages machine learning to know when companies should retry a payment that was previously declined. We also have a solution that automatically updates lost or expired cards thanks to our direct connection with banks in Mexico and around the world, so for example, if a person cancels a credit card that is stored for recurring shopping or to pay for a subscription, it will be automatically updated and the shopping experience will not be interrupted.

Q: What role does cybersecurity play in Stripe’s development plan and what alliances are strengthening the platform’s capabilities?

A: Security is essential for Stripe as a payment company and we take it seriously. Stripe actually invented a technology that encrypts sensitive credit card data directly from a consumer's hands to our secure servers. There, data is encrypted and securely stored in Stripe's vault, which is regularly audited by third-party services. We use cryptographic keys to secure sensitive data, as well as random tokens in place of actual credit card numbers to limit the systems with access to the data as much as possible.

Stripe follows the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI Standard), so companies that operate with us do not need to; we manage it for them. The PCI council is an organization created by the card schemes to guarantee that transaction data is protected by payment service providers. We are certified as a Level 1 provider, which is the highest compliance level of PCI DSS.

We adhere to the highest regulatory standards and the best-in-class rules regarding tokenization. We created Stripe.js so that credit card data never touches the merchant's servers. Even internally, we use random tokens in place of card data to limit the systems’ access to the data as much as possible.

Stripe leads the industry by using HSTS to ensure that browsers never communicate with stripe.com insecurely. We also comply with data protection laws from all around the world, adhering to GDPR from the EU, LGPD from Brazil and CCPA from the US, among others.

Q: What basic steps does Stripe suggest when starting the e-commerce experience?

A: Moving to online sales allows companies to increase their revenues and provides customers a frictionless way to shop. Sometimes people do not have the time to go to a store, so online shopping can resonate with those customers. Companies that want to start selling online do not need to create their website from scratch; they can leverage amazing e-commerce platforms, like Shopify, and Stripe is a partner to many of those. 

Q: What are Stripe’s objectives in Mexico?

A: We have been operating in Mexico since 2019. We have invested to ensure that Stripe provides payment methods that are important to Mexico. Our mission is to bolster the country’s GDP by increasing commerce. We are a reliable partner for companies large and small.

Innovation is at the core of Stripe. We invest significantly in ensuring that we have the strongest and most reliable setup when it comes to payments. We will continue investing in our SaaS solutions to help our merchants increase other revenue streams.

Stripe builds financial tools and economic infrastructure that helps small startups and the world’s biggest companies build products, create business models and scale up their efforts globally.