Solamar had been using the same clunky system to handle our payment processing for a loooooooong time now, which involved an imperfect marriage between powerpay.biz and auth.net. It was the system we set up at the very beginning, back when we first launched this ol’ ship called Solamar, and since it worked and we were grandfathered into plans that had no limits there wasn’t a very compelling reason to switch…at least for a while.
We’d been hearing a LOT of things about Stripe, a powerful, feature-rich yet easy-to-use payment processor that has been making a lot of waves in the media lately. The more we looked at the modern environment and functionality they were offering, especially compared to what we were already using, making the switch seemed more and more attractive.
We finally decided to take the plunge when we realized that if we switched to Stripe, we could consolidate our payment services from two down to one, since Stripe handles all of the things we used to use both powerpay.biz and auth.net for. It saves us all the time we used to have to spend balancing those two systems, and that was an offer too good to pass up.
Still a little worried, we signed up for Stripe but left our accounts at the legacy services open, just in case. In the proceeding months, we discovered that Stripe is, in the words of our Founder and CEO Chelsea Berler, “A-FREAKIN-MAZING!” It’s user-interface is super friendly, and yet it can handle almost anything we throw at it. So last month, we closed our powerpay.biz and auth.net accounts completely, and exclusively use Stripe.
Stick around, and I’ll give you some details on Stripe and what it can do. Continue reading