Payments is a really exciting space at the moment, its being disrupted at an impressive rate and it seems a new provider pops up almost every day. While its gre

Payments is a really exciting space at the moment, its being disrupted at an impressive rate and it seems a new provider pops up almost every day. While its great to read this story I believe to a certain extent at the moment its better the devil you know, especially if you are an established business. I always recommend PayPal to our merchants, not only is it the quickest way to send and receive money online its also backed up by one of the largest payment networks in the world. Also lots of people have money in paypal accounts they would like to spend, not everyone links it back to their bank account. For E-Commerce sites you can expect to loose about 10% of sales by not offering PayPal. However, I appreciate its not for everyone. For alternatives, here I think it really depends on the size and type of your business. If you are doing any type of volume the only serious way to receive payments online is via a Payment Service Provider (PSP), and there are millions of them. You can seriously reduce your transaction costs and often you get some pretty weapons grade anti fraud protection thrown in. Unfortunately setting up a PSP isn't as simple as it sounds, its a two stage process starting with a Merchant Account. This space is pretty dominated by the traditional banks so get ready for a little red tape. Once you have your Merchant Account the PSP slice is normally fairly painless. With regards to Stripe, I'd personally give any startup in this space some time to debug and increase transactions before you trust them with your business. Nice read.