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Stripe’s Next Challenge: Building Its User Base

May 26, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

While the Pays—Apple and Samsung, even PayPal—seem to be occupying a lot of people’s minds these days, there’s one company that’s widely considered a startup success story that doesn’t get quite the airtime of its larger competitors: Stripe.

Stripe was recently said to be in the process of getting a new round of venture capital funding that will put it at an impressive $5 billion valuation, but it may have one big problem preventing it from reaching its peak: landing new users.

Stripe’s technology has been described as a “gateway” service, which in turn allows businesses, and even regular users, to accept payments from anyone, regardless of the platform the users are operating from.

With Stripe, it’s as easy to accept a payment in Bitcoin as it is to accept it from Apple Pay, and that’s a valuable proposition. It will only get more valuable as more users migrate to the Web to do their shopping. While PayPal is still top dog in the field, doing $61.4 billion in transactions in just the first three months of 2015, Stripe is hardly out of the fight, with the last known reports suggesting the company was doing $1.5 billion a year, just last year.

This was given a note of assent by Stripe personnel, who noted the company was doing “billions of dollars a year” in transactions for a wide array of businesses ranging from the earliest start-up to Fortune 500 companies.

Stripe has several points in its favor; a recent partnership with Apple Pay helps, as does the sheer ease of use in terms of starting with Stripe. A dongle and a little information is all that stands between most any business and running transactions through Stripe. Plus, Stripe is widely regarded as playing well with other developers and systems, making it easily adaptable to needs on the ground.

But how does Stripe get its transaction numbers up? Perhaps the biggest thing it could use right now is some aggressive marketing.

I’ve seen very little news come out around Stripe of late, and not much of that good old fashioned “come on in and use our services!” advertising. Of course, that could be what this round of venture capital funding will help; a big ad push might be a real help here, particularly given the sheer flexibility of Stripe. If more people knew about this service, and its benefits matched against its competitors, that could be just what it needs to bulk up the user counts.

Only time will tell just how Stripe manages to fare against its competitors in the field, but we could well see Stripe make a jump to a whole new prominence soon.