Flush with VC cash, U.S. startup Stripe has brought its online payments platform to the Canadian market.
What Stripe has to offer is an easy sell to Canada’s busy, resourcestarved SMBs who want to sell their wares online: a quick way to acceptcredit card payments without a lot of technical tinkering or overheadcosts. Stripe accepts all major credit cards and unlike PayPal, itdoesn’t require etailers to set up an account with them first beforeusing the platform.
How easily and how cheaply? Stripe says it can set it all up for anetailer within minutes and charges its customers a flat fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for every transaction, as described in our sourcearticle from Bloomberg.
Stripe’s entry into the Canadianmarket ramps up its competitive battle with PayPal. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Stripe is basically taking on eBay-owned PayPal, which already has over100 million users worldwide and raked in revenues of $1.4 billion lastyear. Sounds like a daunting challenge but then again, it helps to have$40 million tofinance your war chest. Stripe says it has raised that much so far fromthe likes of Silicon Valley financiers like Peter Thiel, SequoiaCapital and Redpoint Ventures.
Curiously, Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal. He even upped hisindividual stake in Stripe by $5 million last month. So at least he’skeeping this game interesting by financing a new challenger for PayPal,the company that helped him make his fortune.
Canadian firms already using Stripe include Ottawa’s Shopify,Vancouver’s DabbleDB and MetaLab of Victoria, B.C.