Stripe vs. Braintree? What to consider when evaluating payment gateways

If your business accepts payments online or on mobile devices, you likely are working with a payment gateway. Payments gateways, like Stripe and Braintree for example, help you to process credit card, debit card, and other payment methods so your customers can buy your offer. We’re very proud to count Stripe and Braintree among the gateway partners that we integrate with.

As you evaluate your payment gateway strategy, you might start to compare which gateway best suits your business. But is the best approach for your business to compare one versus another, like Stripe vs. Braintree? What if there was an alternative approach? What if you could use both — and any other payment service?

Choosing a Gateway to Deliver Revenue Enablement and Optimization

The world’s largest and fastest growing companies recognize that payments are strategically important to their business. An effective payments strategy allows a business to quickly expand into new markets that may be underserved by their current gateway services. And it ensures that there is always coverage in case of very high demand or an outage. This idea of providing an effective foundation for processing payments is called “Revenue Enablement”.

An effective payments strategy also ensures that the maximum amount of revenue is extracted from each transaction. That means ensuring that false declines are minimized. Higher success rates directly translate into higher short term revenue, happier customers, and higher return customers (i.e. higher long term revenue). It also minimizes false successes, thereby avoiding chargebacks and other expensive transactions.

Braintree vs. Stripe? Use multiple payment gateways

The world’s largest and fastest growing companies have an effective way to achieve revenue enablement and optimization. Rather than relying on a single payment gateway, they use multiple payment gateways to build a best-in-market payments application. You can think of the value for revenue enablement and optimization as falling into one of three main categories:

Reach

As your business grows, you want to accept payments in every market that matters to your business. But as you expand around the globe, you’ll likely see that different gateways are relatively more or less effective in different currencies. Transaction fees might be different. Support for different payments functionality might also be different.

So, rather than asking if you should choose between Stripe vs. Braintree, an effective approach is to choose multiple gateways. Multiple payment gateways allows you to bring online a gateway in one market where another might not have coverage. And it lets you mix and match gateways to optimize for success rates and fees across geographies.

Resiliency and Redundancy

Your online and mobile applications need to be ready to accept payments at any time. Even during your most intense business hours. Like Black Friday for retailers in North America. Or on the weekend for giving platforms and delivery and ride sharing companies. When using a multi-gateway approach, you can efficiently scale and avoid the risks of any single gateway outage.

You can think of payments resiliency as an approach that optimizes success rates across multiple endpoints. If your transactions fail, you could be out millions of dollars. To avoid that, you can connect to multiple gateways. Then, you can also implement rules that route transactions based on business logic through one of the gateways you connect to that offers the highest chances for success.

ROI

If you were to summarize these and other benefits of integrating with multiple payment gateways, it ultimately comes back to the ROI that you can generate. You can combine access to your favorite gateways into a single connection that helps you ensure that transactions successfully flow in all of the markets you want. By working with multiple gateways, you maximize success rates and boost your revenue — all while delivering a great customer experience.

So rather than choosing between Stripe and Braintree. Consider a strategy that lets you build a best-in-market solution tuned to your exact needs.

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Download the Multiple Payment Gateways eBook Below