As with all products, you get what you pay for. Although Stripe is initially slightly more expensive than other payment providers, it saves money by reducing involuntary churn and support costs (when customer payments fail) and increasing conversion rates (through a simpler and more intuitive payment flow, and payment features like Link, which is used by 45% of customers).

We’ve directly observed that payment failure rates through other payment providers on the Ooooby platform are 2 - 3x higher than on Stripe - resulting in lost sales, customer frustration, and increased support costs. This is why we now only offer Stripe as a payment provider.

The Stripe component of our pricing plans is a combination of Stripe fees and variable credit card network fees, with the remainder coming to Ooooby. The prices we get charged by the networks vary significantly per payment based on card provider (e.g. Visa or Mastercard), credit vs debit, domestic vs business card, card reward schemes, country of origin, and much more. We provide a simple Stripe fee which covers all the above, starting at less than the Stripe list-price, and further reducing with our pricing tiers. The remainder comes back to Ooooby to continue investing into the platform.

Transactions flow through Stripe as follows.

Customer payments occur -

Successful and failed payments are viewable in your Stripe portal (see below).

There are four components to the fees deducted from customer payments. These are listed on our pricing page, or in your agreement if on a different pricing tier.

Given a £22.00 payment from a customer, an Ooooby fee of 1.9%, and Stripe fees of 1.3% + 20p, one would expect to see a £1.08 fee listed in Stripe, calculated as follows.

This can appear much higher than other providers where the costs are hidden across multiple invoices and invoice lines, however the pricing is as expected.

You can view the fees charged in your Stripe dashboard by going into a payment (see below).

As Ooooby is a VAT registered company in the UK, we add VAT to fees in the UK. This is not related to your own VAT registration status or the status of the products you sell.

Outside of the UK companies may be responsible for managing sales tax on foreign purchased products via the B2B reverse charge mechanism. Talk to your accountant if you’re unsure.

The per-transaction fee also means that for small transactions, the percentage payment fee is much higher than for higher-value transactions. Asking customers to pay for more weeks up front helps to disperse the per-transaction fee.

Each month, we will generate an invoice for payments processed through Stripe. This invoice will have already been paid.

Since our fees are calculated per transaction (as shown in the example above), small rounding differences can accumulate. As a result, your monthly invoice may vary by a few cents or pence compared to a scenario where fees were charged monthly instead.

For example, for a £19.00 payment with a 1.9% fee, the calculated fee is £0.361, which rounds down to £0.36. Over 100 transactions in a month, this amounts to 100 × £0.36 = £36.00. However, if the fee were applied to the total monthly amount instead, it would be £1,900 × 1.9% = £36.10. The 10p difference arises due to where the rounding occurs.

A payout is when Stripe initiates a transfer from your Stripe account to your bank account. Stripe has a built in payout delay, which is the time from a successful customer payment until it’s sent out of Stripe. There is then an additional delay for the transfer to go from Stripe to your bank, usually 2 - 3 business days.

This means that given a 7 day payout, total elapsed time from payment to being in your account can take 9-10 days.

The payout delay is a risk mitigation feature to help ensure there are sufficient funds in your Stripe account in the event of customer refunds or chargebacks. We are able to lower the payout delay if you are processing consistent sales through the platform above a certain amount.