You need a merchant account to accept card payments. > For an online retailer, does the merchant account replace Stripe/PayPal? It's the other way around. Eac

You need a merchant account to accept card payments. > For an online retailer, does the merchant account replace Stripe/PayPal? It's the other way around. Each retailer needs a merchant account to accept card payments. Without Stripe etc, you'd need to go through the (often tedious) route of getting a merchant account (paperwork, proof of business health, etc) and negotiating rates before you can start integration (using traditionally quite horrible APIs) using it. Stripe is just the middleman which provides their own merchant account with a nice API to accept payments through it. The question is interesting, not because you don't know, but because it reflects how much things and perception changed so that we think: > does the merchant account replace Stripe/PayPal? It shows how successful Stripe has been.