There are literally hundreds of payment gateways/processors available in the US.
Stripe is like the Heroku of payment gateways -- great to start up quickly, great business, very profitable... but customers need to be very wary of various lock in strategies, and generally plan to have multiple providers as the business scales.
Not sure why Square is never mentioned. I use them for my book sales. They work with Woocommerce and my fulfillment warehouse scrapes the orders three times a day.
While my experience with Stripe for my SaaS product has been great I don't like that they hold on to funds for ten days. Square transfers the money the same or the next day.
I've been using Authorize.net for years. Can't imaging using some service that can hold my money hostage. While Authorize.net is "old-school", it is flexible and you are in control. Remind me again why people use Stripe?
> (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)
Yes, there are quite a few of them. For smaller sums KYC is usually not needed. No exchange needed either - as a customer you just send crypto to the payment address they give you, and as a merchant you receive your funds (minus some fee) in either fiat or crypto. No exchange needed in either case. As a merchant you obviously need to do KYC regardless of the amount received.
I know of Bitpay and ForumPay, but there are others too.
EDIT: depending on the currency the blockchain fees can be very low (or very high), so it pays to do your homework.
> (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)
No, you can't because there's no dollars on the blockchain, only varying degrees of unregistered and unregulated money market fund ranging from something fairly reasonable (USDC) to the Reserve Primary Fund that broke the buck in 2008 (USDT, UST).
To send dollars you have to go through an exchange - well two, actually.
BitPay is an exchange. They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money. This is the point where you'd run into AML/KYC/etc issues. Getting money on and off exposes you to massive counterparty risk that could just leave you a creditor in the Bahamas.
You have to combine blockchain fees, exchange fees, forex risk, counter-party risk and legal/compliance risk - plus all blockchain transactions have to be reported with their cost basis on your taxes. If you're trying to do it 'right' you will pay wildly more for anything on the blockchain because decentralization is significantly less efficient.
Actually the payment is made in crypto (BTC, ETH, also USDT if you so desire) and the fiat is paid out to the merchant. Obviously there is some exchange somewhere in the back, but neither merchant nor custumer are interacting with it.
EDIT: I won't be dragged into discussion about crypto. GGP asked about option, I gave one. Do your homework and don't believe random HN posters (which goes for both of us). Over and out.
> They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money.
Did I misunderstand? If so, my bad.
[edit] BitPay is actually fascinating because they publish their merchant breakdown, or at least they used to. It's overwhelmingly all prepaid gift cards, "internet" and VPN. And the share has shifted more and more towards prepaid gift cards. [1]
> What if you don't want to go through an exchange?
You don't need an exchange to take payments, but you will need to trade the currency into fiat at one point, either through an exchange or an OTC trade.
There are alternatives, but you will find support horror stories about all of them. Unless they're very new, maybe. Certainly PayPal/Braintree is no refuge from this sort of madness.
Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna.
What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent?
(can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)