BlueSnap: The Better Stripe Alternative for the Globally Minded Business

While Stripe seems like a simple solution to become your payment provider, sometimes that simplicity is the challenge.

The simplicity of Stripe isn’t a good match for growing or mid- to large-size businesses, particularly when it comes to cross-border sales. With 57% of shoppers making a cross-border purchase in the last 6 months, it’s imperative to be able to successfully sell around the globe.

With Stripe, selling internationally requires multiple accounts – one for each country where you want to accept payments – and that means you have to dedicate more time and resources to manage them. But there is a better way: Having one account that provides you with the ability to sell globally without the need to establish an additional account each time you want to expand your business into a new country.

That’s why one of the best available alternatives to Stripe is BlueSnap. BlueSnap’s Global Payment Orchestration Platform allows customers to optimize their payments and use our modular value-added services to their benefits to sell globally with one account. We’ve designed our platform to provide you with more control over important aspects of your end-to-end payment stack, allowing you to turn functionality on or off as needed. You receive all of this through a single integration to our Payment API or hosted payment page, including the ability to:

• Accept payments in over 200 geographies with 100+ payment types & 100+ currencies to increase sales.
• Benefit from local card acquiring in 47 countries.
• Reduce technical debt through a single integration.
• Automate fraud and chargeback management to avoid lost revenue and higher fees.
• Get paid faster with our Invoicing & Billing solutions, including subscriptions & recurring billing and AR Automation.
• Ensure you’re compliant with local tax requirements and built-in tax solutions.

All of this is built directly into your one account that you can use to choose how to tailor your payment experience for customers. Each component of the Global Payment Orchestration Platform can be turned on and off by country, by product, by issuer and more. It’s a truly modular solution.

Our entire solution has been designed to optimize payments for your business to drive your bottom line. To increase your revenue, we improve the payment experience, reduce technical debt, and increase your authorization rates to capture more sales. We even focus on ways to decrease the costs associated with payments – eliminating unnecessary cross-border fees and foreign exchange expenses, friendly fraud costs and more.

And most importantly, BlueSnap delivers payments, powered by people. Our Payments Experts get to know your business and customers to help you design and implement a payment solution that contributes to your success.

So if you’re in search of Stripe alternatives, start by learning more about BlueSnap. Check out the comparisons for a breakdown of payment processing features.

Global Processing

Features	BlueSnap	Stripe
Countries Supported for Businesses	200+ countries/territories	43
Acquiring Banks for Local Payment Processing	30+ globally, included with your merchant account to increase transaction approval rates worldwide	A single bank connection. Additional banks available but require additional work
Intelligent Payment Routing	Yes — contributing up to a 6% increase in sales	No
# Of Currencies Accepted	100+	135+
# Of Payment Types Accepted	100+	48
Supported eWallets	Apple Pay, Google Pay, Click to Pay, PayPal, Masterpass, Skrill, Alipay	Apple Pay, Alipay, Google Pay, Click to Pay, GrabPay, Microsoft Pay

BlueSnap helps you increase authorization rates no matter where your customers are located:

• We use a global network of more than 30 banks to increase every transaction’s chances of success. Cross-border transactions can experience up to 20% more declines due to the challenges posed by using an out-of-country acquiring bank. But with BlueSnap, no matter where your shoppers are in the world, our Intelligent Payment Routing directs transactions to the bank most likely to approve them.
• We use Intelligent Payment Routing to increase authorization rates and lower costs. This feature maximizes your success by automatically routing transactions to increase the likelihood of approval and reduce cross-border fees.. (With Stripe you will have multiple accounts – one for the US and one for the EU, for example. You will have to build the logic to route transactions to the appropriate account to achieve higher approvals and lower costs.)
• We provide redundancy & failover built-in. BlueSnap automatically routes failed transactions to other acquiring banks for approval, increasing sales up to 6%. (Stripe only has one acquiring bank in each the US and EU. You will have to contract with another payment provider, integrate to that payment provider and then develop failover logic to route transactions to the secondary payment provider.)
• We support 100+ currencies and 100+ payment methods to help capture more sales. We enable you to provide a localized payment experience, including the currencies and payment methods your customers want to use and reducing checkout abandonment.

Read more about our global payments features and how they help increase global sales.

User Experience & Integration

Features	BlueSnap	Stripe
Integration Methods/Options	API, Hosted payment fields, Localized hosted checkout, Platform plug-ins, SDKs in multiple languages, In-app payments	API, Checkout form, Platform plug-ins, SDKs, In-app payments
Additional Ways to Accept Payments	Marketplaces, Subscriptions, Invoice Payments, Virtual Terminal	Marketplaces, Subscriptions, Invoice Payments
# Of Languages	29	27
Integration Partners	100+ integrations	100+ integrations

Our integration options help you to remove friction from the checkout experience by giving you:

• You have the option to integrate directly to BlueSnap through our Payment API that provides full control over to customize your checkout experience, for you or if you need to get up and running quickly, utilize BlueSnap Checkout to tailor customer fields and how customers view your checkout page.
• The ability to design mobile-optimized checkout pages in a secure payment environment. Plus, you can maximize conversions by accepting all the most popular eWallets.
• The ability to communicate with customers in 29 languages compared to Stripe’s 27. (Remember: 75% of shoppers prefer not to make a purchase decision unless the site is presented in their native language — that’s why BlueSnap is one of the best Stripe alternatives around.)
• The ability to connect with 100+ popular business platforms and shopping carts, so you don’t have to change your existing solution. Find your current platform connection here.

Choose how you want to accept payments:

Built into BlueSnap’s Global Payment Orchestration Platform is the ability to offer multiple ways to accept payments. Simply connect once and enable additional ways to pay as you expand into new markets or sales channels. Our features include the following:

• With our Embedded Payments & Payfac-as-a-Service capabilities, you can own a global customized payment experience for your clients that increases revenue for your business. Our solution can enable you to earn up to a 5X increase in value per customer.
• Invoicing & Billing digitalizes the entire AR workflow. Our tools are designed to reduce your DSO, boost productivity, improve the customer experience and enhance your ability to plan for your business’s future.
• Virtual terminal allows you to quickly start processing electronic payments to help you take payments by mail, email or phone. You can get paid faster while increasing customer satisfaction. You can even store payment information for future charges and avoid late payments.

Read more about virtual terminal, invoice payments and Embedded Payments & Payfac-as-a-Service to see what works best for your business.

Subscriptions

Features	BlueSnap	Stripe
Recurring Payments	Yes, plus a full subscription engine for more complex requirements.	Yes
Account Updater	Yes	Yes
Automated Retries	Yes	Yes
Automated Reminders	Yes	Yes

BlueSnap offers recurring payment capabilities plus a full subscription engine for more complex requirements. Our features:

• Include Account Updater, which automatically updates your shoppers’ subscription payment information so you don’t lose sales when their cards expire or change.
• Allow you to accept alternative payment options with subscription billing. Let your customers pay for subscriptions using wire transfers, purchase orders, and e-checks if they like.
• Automatically retry subscription purchases several times during a grace period to maximize customer conversion globally.

Read about the award-winning subscription billing engine that can help increase your revenue on a global scale.

Fraud & Chargeback Prevention

Features	BlueSnap	Stripe
Real-Time Fraud Detection	Yes. We partner with Kount to provide industry-leading fraud prevention built into our platform.	Yes — a homegrown solution.
Chargeback Management & Disputes	Yes. We partner with Chargebacks911 to provide the tools to help dispute chargebacks.	Yes — a limited, manual homegrown solution.
Pre-Chargeback Alerts	Yes. We provide a complete pre-chargeback alert service that includes Verifi and Ethoca alerts, and Rapid Dispute Resolution.	No
3-D Secure	Yes	Yes
Tokenization & Vaulting	Yes	Yes
PCI Compliance	PCI Level 1	PCI Level 1

We provide the most extensive fraud and chargeback management solutions that are built-in to safeguard your revenue and prevent fraud and chargebacks from compromising your business.

• Our Global Payment Orchestration Platform, with Kount’s fraud prevention solution built-in, makes it possible to verify legitimate customer transactions while declining suspicious transactions. This optimizes your revenue while safeguarding your company.
  
• We offer a comprehensive chargeback management solution that allows you to monitor and dispute chargebacks before they even occur. With BlueSnap, you can track trends and optimize your data to target disputed transactions and recover lost revenue.
• We employ a variety of tools to help identify fraudulent activity and potential chargebacks, mitigating the impact on your business. Best of all, BlueSnap will handle the dispute process and refund the customer for you so you can focus on your business.
• BlueSnap incorporates award-winning fraud prevention solutions like Kount and Strong Customer Authentication tools like 3DS to verify legitimate customer transactions and decline suspicious transactions.
• PCI level 1 compliance, or for merchants that host their own order pages and use BlueSnap APIs, free enrollment in a PCI security program through Security Metrics.

Read more about the built-in, world-class fraud prevention solution that makes us a better alternative to Stripe.

Support

Features	BlueSnap	Stripe
Reporting	Sales intelligence, payment conversion reporting, and consolidated reconciliation for all payment types and currencies. A mobile app gives you 24/7 access to data. A reporting API to pull the data into the systems you already use.	Additional fee for Sigma to get sales intelligence, conversion reports, and reconciliation.
Customer Support	Global team with call-in support, email support, live chat, implementation support	Online resources, email support, and live chat
Developer Support	A Developer Hub and a dedicated account management team	Stripe.com/docs, limited account management

Our in-person support for merchants makes us an especially strong Stripe alternative. We offer:

• Support staff available around the world. We are always ready to assist you with your payment gateway and merchant account questions. Contact us by phone, email, or live chat.
• Developer documentation that’s among the best in the business. Our Developer Hub provides code samples, a simple sandbox testing tool (no account needed!), and a place for developers to ask questions and get answers.
• Sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities that let you deep-dive into your payment data and help you boost conversions. Plus, you get 24/7 access to data with our mobile app.

See what our detailed reports can tell you about your business.

Ready to upgrade your payment solution? Contact us! We’d love to help your business boost its revenue.