Last week WooCommerce announced on Twitter that its Stripe payment gateway is now a free product. Prior to this decision, it was priced at $79 for a single license, $99 for up to five sites, and $199 for up to 25 sites.
Exciting product announcement from @stripe (which is also now free for WooCommerce, woo!) https://t.co/kQet52WMbn pic.twitter.com/PzCRoyrgWG
— Woo (@WooCommerce) February 25, 2016
The news coincides with the debut of Stripe’s new Atlas product, which allows foreign companies to incorporate as a U.S. company in Delaware, set up a U.S. bank account, and accept payments with Stripe. Atlas was created to help entrepreneurs start global businesses no matter where they are located in the world.
Automattic had a similar aim of lowering the barrier to entry for WooCommerce when it made the Stripe payment gateway available for free.
“Receiving payments is integral to running an online store,” WooCommerce Product Team Lead Matty Cohen said. “Publishing the WooCommerce Stripe integration for free is one way we are helping merchants to get their stores set up quicker, and to easily receive credit card payments through their stores.
“One of our focuses is to lower the barrier to entry and to assist WooCommerce stores in becoming successful,” Cohen said. “We are excited to be partners in making payment processing globally available for WooCommerce merchants.”
Over the past two years, Stripe has been working to expand its services beyond the handful of countries it initially supported in the US and Europe. Although Stripe is increasingly popular, it cannot yet be considered a global option for accepting payments. It’s currently in private beta for businesses in Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, Singapore, and Switzerland.
Products like Atlas, in combination with the free gateway available from WooCommerce, should serve to bring Stripe availability to more locations around the world. WooCommerce representatives would not comment on whether Automattic is planning on offering more payment gateweys for free.
Wise move by Automattic, hopefully they can get listed as an official partner of Stripe/Atlas which would be huge. When the time is right, they should demand a % of global processing fees from all payments processed via Stripe through Woo sites as well to offset the free development… that is what they have with Mastercard already I believe and it’s what they deserve from Stripe ;)