Stripe made Terminal generally available to US users on June 11, 2019, giving businesses a way to add in-person card payments to an existing Stripe integration. The product combines software development kits, application programming interfaces and pre-certified readers. For an online merchant opening a shop, or a software platform serving businesses that take payments face to face, the offer is a shared payments system—not a finished checkout application. [S1]
For platforms, the change reaches beyond the card reader. Stripe said Terminal would bring online and in-person customer and sales information into one view. Through Connect, its platform-payments product, connected accounts could accept in-person payments inside the platform and receive a unified payout covering online and physical transactions. A platform could also manage its readers and ship them directly to connected accounts from the Stripe Dashboard. Consolidating those jobs gives an existing Stripe platform a reason to extend the same provider into stores. The announcements do not establish that this is cheaper than a separate payments setup. [S1]
There is still an application to build. Stripe’s June instructions tell developers to create the mobile or web sales interface, integrate the Terminal software development kit, then pair a reader with it. Its original September 2018 announcement described readers from BBPOS and Verifone, already certified for Stripe’s processing platform, alongside software for managing devices across locations. Stripe supplies the payment connection and supported hardware; the business or its software provider supplies the customer-facing sales application. [S1][S2]
The original launch also separated hardware spending from transaction charges. In September 2018, Stripe quoted a processing fee of 2.7% plus 5 US cents per transaction and reader prices ranging from $59 for a mobile device to $299 for a countertop terminal. Those are the terms in the original launch announcement, not a newly confirmed June 2019 price schedule. They illustrate why a payment rate is only part of a deployment budget: a business also needs readers and the application described in Stripe’s integration steps. Neither announcement supplies a complete development-cost estimate. [S1][S2]
The June rollout is US-only. Stripe directs businesses outside the country to sign up for a notification when Terminal becomes available there. [S1]
Source documents
- Stripe Terminal is now generally available in the UShttps://stripe.com/blog/terminal-in-person-payments
- Stripe announces Stripe Terminal, a programmable point of sale for in-person paymentshttps://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-launches-terminal