Leading sellers to market: Stripe reveals handy new e-commerce tools

26 May 2017

Image: Stanisic Vladimir/Shutterstock

Irish brothers’ $9bn San Francisco e-commerce platform is making it easier for marketplaces to onboard sellers.

Patrick and John Collison’s Stripe is hellbent on improving its e-commerce capabilities and, in recent months, the company revealed a raft of new tools to swiftly get trading.

Stripe is launching a new service that will enable online marketplaces to bring sellers to their platform and provide multiple payment services.

For example, Stripe recently introduced its Atlas tool to make it easier for entrepreneurs to set up their businesses and navigate their way through bureaucracy with ease.

In 2012, the company created Stripe Connect, which makes it possible for marketplaces and sharing-economy services to access billions of potential buyers and services globally.

Stripe Connect went live in Ireland in July last year and, in effect, the service commoditises the payment structures required to create a multisided marketplace.

The platform now powers on-demand marketplaces – such as Squarespace, Kickstarter, Lyft, Instacart and Shopify – with services such as one-to-many payments, holding fund, account debits and many-to-many payments.

Take the Stripe Express

Leading sellers to market: Stripe reveals handy new e-commerce tools

From left: John and Patrick Collison. Image: Stripe

Last night (25 May), the company revealed a new version of Stripe Connect, launching in the US first, which enables marketplace owners to sign up to the platform in less than two minutes.

This compares with the industry average of about several weeks.

“Express handles all the required data collection – from bank account information to identity verification – while being obsessively focused on quick onboarding on both desktop and mobile,” explained Jorge Ortiz, product manager with Stripe.

“You can customise the Express UI so it fits perfectly with your existing sign-up funnel, and you have the flexibility to control payout schedules. Your recipients can access the Express dashboard through your platform and see when they’ll get paid.”

The Stripe e-commerce engine has been going from strength to strength and, last November, the company was valued at $9bn following a $150m funding round led by CapitalG and General Catalyst.

Stripe was founded seven years ago in San Francisco.

When they were teenagers living in Limerick, the Collison brothers began a start-up called Shuppa in 2007 and it later became known as Auctomatic. It was acquired by Canadian firm Live Current Media for $5m when the brothers were just 19 and 17 respectively.

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

editorial@siliconrepublic.com