Not to mention, once you have some monthly transaction volume going, both PayPal and a good merchant account are cheaper than Stripe. It's easy to get a bad merchant account where the fees are opaque and creep up on you monthly, but good ones (especially interchange-plus pricing where you always know you're paying a fixed amount over cost) are attainable for even the smallest business.
Stripe's API sure is spiffy (they're on my short list of backup payment services), but not that different than, say, Authorize.net which would be a cheap gateway option for most merchant accounts. Making a charge, refund or storing a credit card number in their secure vault offering are all a matter of a simple HTTP POST of a couple XML fields. That's not anything new, their API and others have been around for years and years.
Stripe's API sure is spiffy (they're on my short list of backup payment services), but not that different than, say, Authorize.net which would be a cheap gateway option for most merchant accounts. Making a charge, refund or storing a credit card number in their secure vault offering are all a matter of a simple HTTP POST of a couple XML fields. That's not anything new, their API and others have been around for years and years.