Collison brothers’ Stripe redesigns its checkout feature

6 Mar 2014

Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison

The Collison brothers’ Silicon Valley start-up Stripe has rolled out the first update to its e-commerce checkout service and the revamped tool now includes separate billing and shipping addresses and instant billing verification.

“We launched the first version of the Checkout a year ago,” explained Stripe’s Michaël Villar in the Stripe blog.

“From the start, the goal has been to create best possible payments flow. Each site should not have to duplicate the work of device optimisation and A/B testing.”

Revamped address handling now supports separate billing and shipping addresses – one of the most common feature requests.  Entering addresses is now streamlined – Stripe will automatically select the user’s country, and can fill in their city and state when they enter a postal code.

“We now support integrated billing address verification. This means that users are notified immediately if they’ve mistyped anything,” Villar said.

Stripe has also added a ‘Remember me’ checkbox that allows customers to save their payment information by providing a mobile phone number.

Mobile explosion

Villar said mobile usage continues to explode for Stripe. “We’ve learned a lot about what works on what doesn’t over the past year, and we’ve redesigned Checkout from scratch for every device. Checkout is gorgeous on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, OS X, Windows, tablet, desktop, and mobile.”

E-payments company Stripe, founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, raised US$80m in January in a Series C funding round that has valued the company at US$1.75bn.

The company, which employs 83 people, raised its first round of funding of US$2m in 2011 from investment veterans Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Further funding of US$18m followed in 2012 by Sequoia Capital, valuing Stripe at US$100m at the time.

Of the 83 staff, 22pc are former founders and 36pc hail from outside the US.

Patrick (25) and John (23) sold their first company Auctomatic to Canadian firm Live Current Media for US$5m (€3.2m) when they were 17 and 19, respectively. In recent weeks, the pair were listed among five Irishmen who made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

In 2012, SecondMarket.com, a New York-based company that has served as a hub for transactions of pre-IPO Facebook stock, informally tipped Stripe as the next Y Combinator company that might be valued at more than US$1bn, following Dropbox and Airbnb.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com