Why use Stripe?
Payment processing, or more specifically the handling of payment card data, is a very sensitive part of building an online shop of any kind. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to make sure you are PCI DSS compliant if you process payment card data on your own servers. However, luckily for us we don't need to, as we can make use of the Stripe online payment service to process that data on our behalf.
Simple PCI compliance
By using Stripe, we make PCI compliance infinitely simpler, because our user's payment card data is sent to Stripe servers for processing rather than ours. Getting your head around how this works takes a little thought, but it is actually a pretty simple concept. Payment card details are first posted off to Stripe servers where they validate them and get pre-approval for the amount you wish to charge them. If all is successful, a token is returned, which can then be posted to our own server along with the rest of the order information, such as products...