Take payments on your website. Without a webshop.

You need a deposit. Not a webshop.

A caterer wants a deposit before holding the date. A driving instructor sells a package of lessons. A carpenter wants an invoice paid online. A full webshop is overkill for that, and emailing your bank details is slow and easy to get wrong.

How do you take payments on a website?

Behind every online payment is a payment provider: a company that takes the card details, checks the payment and sends the money to your bank account. Stripe is one of the best known. Your website never sees the card number. The customer types it on the provider’s secure form.

For a small business there are roughly three ways to do it:

• A payment link: you create a link with your payment provider and put it on a button or in an email. Quick to set up, but it sits outside your website.
• A webshop: a cart, products and stock control. The right choice if you sell many products, but too much if you need a deposit.
• A payment block on the page: the customer pays right where they read about the service. This is what Striive plans to build.

How payments are planned to work in Striive

The first version is planned to work like this:

1. You connect your own Stripe account to Striive.
2. You add a payment block to any page in the editor, just like a text or an image.
3. You choose the kind of payment: a deposit, a service, a product, or an amount the customer types in, which is handy for paying an invoice.
4. The customer pays on the page, and the money goes to your Stripe account.
5. You see the list of payments, and can make refunds, in your Striive admin.

What will it cost?

Striive takes a platform fee of 1.5% of each payment your customers make through Striive. It comes on top of Stripe’s own processing fee, which Stripe charges you directly. If you refund a payment, the 1.5% is refunded too.

What the payment block won’t be

It’s not planned as a webshop. There’s no cart, no stock control and no shipping. It’s for businesses that sell services, take deposits or want invoices paid, not for selling hundreds of products.

What you can do today

You can already get paid for what customers order through your website. The payment itself just happens outside Striive for now.

• Add a form where customers ask for a quote or place an order. Each enquiry is saved in your admin, and the site’s admins get an email when a new one arrives.
• Send a payment link or an invoice from the tool you already use.
• Or link a button to a payment page you already have with your payment provider.