How to accept payments on your website

This covers taking payments directly on your own site for things you don't sell through a shop: services, bookings, deposits, invoices. If you're selling physical products, that's a shop (Shopify, which the next guide covers), and that comes with its own checkout already built in.

Stripe, or a similar processor, gets connected to your site so visitors can pay by card without leaving it. You'll need your own Stripe account, because the money settles to you, not to me, and Stripe takes a small cut per transaction rather than charging a monthly fee: currently 1.5% + 20p for a standard UK card. There's nothing else to pay Stripe unless a customer pays with an international or premium card, which costs a little more.

Payment processing is a £250 add-on, and it's built into the Premium package as standard. Because it's an integration handling real money, a site with payments needs to sit on at least the Standard maintenance plan.

Stripe's fraud-prevention cookie is a genuinely debated case rather than a clean exemption, so I ask for cookie consent before it loads rather than assume it's exempt. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that matters if you're ever asked about your site's compliance.

If you're taking a deposit, charging for a consultation, or letting someone pay an invoice online, this is the right tool. If you've got a catalogue of products to sell, go with Shopify instead: you get inventory, shipping, and a checkout built for retail, not just a payment box.