What is Stripe?
In recent years Stripe has become very well known and successful. It is one of the newer generation of payment merchants that have challenged the sleepy traditional players (such as Worldpay and Sagepay now Opayo) with apps that are very easy to integrate and use but on the other hand have relatively high fees. Other players in this space are Square, Ayden and Revolut. These companies sit between you who they call “the merchant” and the large card processors Visa, Mastercard etc. to process the payments and transfer the funds into your bank account (hence called Merchant Processors). They also deal with refunds, charge-backs and disputes. Stripe has grown rapidly to become the leader due to its dedicated WooCommerce payment gateway plugin, ease-of-use and great customer support unlike the traditional processors that provide none of these. For many small online businesses Stripe is now the default option for taking payments and for this reason we have added bespoke fee handling feature on top of the standard gateway, but in time will roll it out into other gateways.
How Does Xeroom Post an Order That is Paid Using Stripe?
The regular payment flow is as follows. The first step to use Stripe in WooCommerce is to install the Stripe plugin and configure it with your Stripe account – this is very easy and there are plenty of detailed guides on how to do it.
Moving to Xeroom, each payment gateway that exists in WooCommerce has its own account mapping to its respective bank account in Xero. This ensures segregation of payments for ease of reconciliation and also enables the bank account to be used as a clearing account too so that no payments are missed. The additional tick box allows for some gateways to operate automatically such as instant ones like card payments or PayPal and for others to not, such as bank transfer where the payment might not occur until some time later but the invoice is needed in Xero to trigger the payment as in the case of B2B payments on account.
When a customer places an order at checkout he/she will have a choice of payment methods and if they select Stripe then the order gets created, payment is made and then the order is sent by Xeroom to Xero where it creates a new invoice. The Orders dashboard is updated with the Xero status and notes are made against the order itself regarding the posting of both the order, Stripe fee, payment and payment reference (Notes 1-4) .