Blog
Boost sales in minutes with Afterpay on Stripe
Patrick Collison on February 24, 2021
Boost sales in minutes with Afterpay on Stripe—Offering buy now, pay later options like Afterpay can give your buyers more flexibility at checkout. Afterpay (also known as Clearpay) is now available for Stripe businesses in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It works with any kind of Stripe integration, including Connect, and eligible businesses can start accepting payments in minutes—there’s no application, onboarding, or underwriting process to get started. Learn more
Stripe’s payments APIs: the first ten years
Michelle Bu on December 15, 2020 in Engineering
A few years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek published a feature story on Stripe. Four words spanned the center of the cover: “seven lines of code,” suggesting that’s all it took for a business to power payments on Stripe. The assertion was bold—and became a theme and meme for us.
To this day, it’s not entirely clear which seven lines the article referenced. The prevailing theory is that it’s the roughly seven lines of curl it took to create a Charge
. However, a search for the seven lines of code ultimately misses the point: the ability to open up a terminal, run this curl snippet, then immediately see a successful credit card payment felt like seven lines of code. It’s unlikely that a developer believed a production-ready payments integration involved literally only seven lines of code. But taking something as complex as credit card processing and reducing the integration to only a few lines of code that, when run, immediately returns a successful Charge
object is really quite magical.
Abstracting away the complexity of payments has driven the evolution of our APIs over the last decade. This post provides the context, inflection points, and conceptual frameworks behind our API design. It’s the extreme exception that our approach to APIs makes the cover of a business magazine. This post shares a bit more of how we’ve grown around and beyond those seven lines.
A condensed history of Stripe’s payments APIs
Successful products tend to organically expand over time, resulting in product debt. Similar to tech debt, product debt accumulates gradually, making the product harder to understand for users and change for product teams. For API products, it’s particularly tempting to accrue product debt because it’s hard to get your users to fundamentally restructure their integration; it’s much easier to get them to add a parameter or two to their existing API requests.
In retrospect, we see clearly how our APIs have evolved—and which decisions were pivotal in shaping them. Here are the milestones that defined our payments APIs and led to the PaymentIntents API.
More ways for Connect platforms to move money within Canada
Patrick Collison on December 9, 2020
More ways for Connect platforms to move money within Canada—You can now use separate charges and transfers and account debits with your Express and Custom connected accounts.
Introducing Stripe Treasury
Patrick Collison on December 3, 2020
Introducing Stripe Treasury—Banking-as-a-service for software platforms, built in partnership with the world’s leading banks. Embed interest-earning accounts, bill pay, ACH and wire transfers, and provide your customers faster access to revenue directly in your platform. Request an invite
Stripe Capital is now available for platforms
Patrick Collison on December 1, 2020
Stripe Capital is now available for platforms—Connect platforms with US-based customers can leverage our lending API to provide their customers with access to fast and flexible financing. Learn more
European payment methods available worldwide in minutes, not months
Sophie Sakellariadis on October 27, 2020
A great promise of the internet is to eliminate the impact of physical distance on our lives. But 35+ years after the internet’s founding, selling cross-border remains shockingly difficult. Why?
Online commerce is fragmented. The top 50 ecommerce markets have over 75 popular payment methods—including wallets, bank methods, and even cash at convenience stores. Accepting more payment methods is important: buyers often abandon checkout if they can’t use their preferred way to pay. But it can take months to add local payment options. Before engineering work can even begin, you need to register foreign corporate entities, open new bank accounts, pay local taxes, and fill out reams of compliance forms. It shouldn’t be this hard.
Introducing new tools for managing fraud workflows in Radar for Fraud Teams
Patrick Collison on October 15, 2020
Introducing new tools for managing fraud workflows in Radar for Fraud Teams
Radar for Fraud Teams helps you better manage fraud with tools to get more insight into fraud signals for each transaction, help predict disputes you’re likely to win, and assign review owners. Read the docs or get started now in the Dashboard.
![](https://web.archive.org./web/20210311150822im_/https://b.stripecdn.com/site-srv/assets/img/blog/posts/new-radar-tools-for-managing-fraud-workflows/screenshot-930b4ad67610fd82a169fa969f5a1fe79f7467bc.png)
Cross-border payouts are now available in beta
Patrick Collison on October 14, 2020
Cross-border payouts are now available in beta—US Connect platforms can send payouts to recipients in their local currencies in 33 countries (with more coming this year). Learn how to get started
New Dashboard features to save you time
Sashko Stubailo on October 8, 2020
The Stripe Dashboard is the hub for millions of businesses to take action—whether that’s a founder at a small startup that interacts directly with customers or support teams at larger organizations working to address thousands of customer inquiries each week.
We built Checkout so you don’t have to
Sam Gerstenzang on September 10, 2020
When Stripe first launched, we made it easier for businesses to design their own payment forms while minimizing the PCI burden. In the past 10 years, however, online commerce has become more complicated.