Stripe Integrates with Ecwid, Expands Account Management Tools

Stripe is the latest payments provider to integrate its technology with Ecwid, a developer of e-commerce tools to add turnkey online stores to websites, blogs and social media pages.

Stripe joins a list of more than 30 payments providers that partner with Ecwid, including American Express, First Data, PayPal and Visa's CyberSource, as well as other merchant acquiring services and international payments gateways in countries like Finland, Mexico and Russia.

Stripe's desktop online and mobile payments technology is available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, as well as in private beta tests in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Spain. This week, the San Francisco-based company added a feature to let users manage multiple Stripe accounts from a single login, as well as let multiple users share access to individual accounts.

Ecwid merchants can now establish a Stripe account and connect the payments gateway to their online stores. The process takes three steps, Ecwid says in a recent blog post.

"Historically you would get a merchant account in a bank, get approved, set up a payment gateway, etc. and it can take several days to finish the whole process," the post says. "Stripe … provides a really easy and fast way to start accepting credit cards online. You just create a new Stripe account, fill up a short form and start accepting live transactions immediately."

"We're very excited to be working with Ecwid," says Stripe President John Collison in a Jan. 9 press release. "Obviating the traditional need for cumbersome merchant accounts and gateways, Stripe allows Ecwid users to sell to anyone, anywhere, in minutes."

The integration brings together two companies that are heavily invested in social media-based e-commerce. Ecwid acquired the merchant base of defunct competitor Payvment in January 2013 and now says its shopping cart software for Facebook pages is used by more than 40,000 stores. Last fall, Stripe was among the first payments providers to support Autofill with Facebook, which lets consumers store payment information to make mobile payments without having to type account information for each transaction.

Ecwid's initial payment integrations required consumers be directed from the merchant store to the gateway's own site to process the transaction. Now, some of its integrations, including Stripe, PayPal and American Express, support payment processing directly within the merchant's online store.

Stripe has previously integrated its technology with online storefront technology developers Shopify and Weebly, as well as Believe.in, a Web developer for charities. Its application programming interface tools have been used as the foundation of other payments startups.

Ecwid, which stands for "e-commerce widget," was founded in 2009 by a team previously involved in the creation of X-Cart, another e-commerce shopping cart. It has offices in Encinitas, Calif. and Ulyanovsk, Russia. In 2011, it received a $1.5 million investment from Moscow-based venture capital firm Runa Capital, which has backed other payments startups including X-Cart, Rocketbank and Ubank.