ANNIE SCHMIDT: So even though ecommerce continues to grow, 78% of commerce in the US still happens in person. That means this is too big of an opportunity for your business to ignore.

And we know that consumers expect seamless experiences across channels, and their preferences for how to pay are constantly changing. However, almost half of you have told us that you’re not able to adapt quickly enough because of outdated and fragmented payment tools. Well, I’m really excited to share what the Stripe teams have been building to help you stay ahead. 

So today we’re going to cover how Stripe enables you to create seamless experiences and unify your data across touchpoints, and how we enable you to adapt to consumer needs with new ways to pay, flexible integrations, and deeper customization. And finally—and this is my favorite part—we’re going to hear from Stripe users Buck Mason, NewStore, and Xero about how they’re unifying commerce for their businesses. So let’s jump in. 

Terminal unifies in-person and online payments so you can build personalized experiences to grow your revenue. It’s an end-to-end solution, including hardware, device management, global coverage, and partner integrations with hundreds of software platforms to help you integrate with your existing tech stack. And most importantly, developer integrations to help you launch quickly. 

So from its inception, Terminal was built to be an extension of the full Stripe ecosystem, which means you can use it seamlessly with other Stripe products for things like online payments, invoicing, payouts, and unified reporting. And you can do all of this with a single set of integrations globally. So working closely with users like Shopify, Hertz, URBN, and many of you in this room, we’re adding new payment methods and form factors to help you stay ahead. 

And you’ve told us that your consumers are demanding more speed and ease of how they pay, and the data tells the same story. So let’s look at four examples. First, buy now, pay later, which was long considered an ecommerce play, is now taking hold in person. And more than a quarter of US consumers have used one in a physical store. Second, QR code payments are now surging globally as an easy payment alternative. 

Third, contactless payments continue to rise, and they now far surpass card insert and card swipe in popularity. And finally, digital wallets are really driving this growth in contactless payments and now account for more than a third of all of Terminal’s transactions. So, how does Stripe help you stay ahead of these trends? 

First, we now support buy now, pay later methods, like Affirm, both online and in store. Second, we enable QR code payments, starting with Weixin Pay, which was formerly known as WeChat Pay, so that you can reach the more than one billion consumers globally who use this payment method. So for both of these payment methods, Stripe displays a preconfigured QR code. The consumer simply scans that with their phone and approves the payment. 

Third, we are enabling you to accept and use digital wallets like Apple Pay in more places, including signing up for subscriptions in person. In fact, Stripe is the first payments provider to support this capability. And fourth, we’re continuing to expand Tap to Pay to enable you to accept contactless payments with just an iPhone or an Android device. 

So let me bring out Shawn to show you how Tap to Pay works, because here at Stripe, we love live demos. 

SHAWN RAZEK: Tap to Pay is the fastest way to launch in-person payments with Stripe. Users like Woo and Talus have integrated it into their existing application in less than two days, leveraging the Terminal SDK. And as Annie mentioned, contactless payments are now becoming more ubiquitous with consumers. 

So when I want to use Tap to Pay, a consumer can simply tap their card or mobile wallet on a business’s iPhone or Android device, like I’ll show you here on this Google Pixel. Launching a simple POS app that you see here, I can just add a couple of items to the cart, and I can check out. And in this case, I’m going to collect payments using just a contactless card, but I could have also used a mobile wallet on my phone. 

And with a simple tap, I’ve taken the payment. And this was processed as a card-present transaction, which means lower interchange costs and added security. 

But users don’t have to just use consumer Android devices. They can leverage other Android devices as well. We have users like Eventbrite that have deployed their same exact Android Tap to Pay application on devices like the Zebra here to support more ruggedized environments for outdoor events. And then users like Oddle are leveraging a SUNMI device that you can see here that has printer capabilities, which is really great for tableside ordering at restaurants. 

And regardless of the device, the Tap to Pay experience is exactly the same. So I’ll show you that here. Here we have a Rustic Table eatery. We’ll add a couple of items to the cart as well. And then we’ll check out. This time, I’ll use a mobile wallet. Simply tap it on the device here—let me give you a better view of that. 

And just like that, the payment’s complete. But we have a printer in this device, so let’s show that off real quick. So Tap to Pay helps give your consumers the speed and ease they expect. And if you want to learn more, come chat with myself, with Annie, and my other colleagues down in the expo hall—we’re all hanging out at the unified commerce booth—and you can play with this SUNMI device, the Zebra device, and all the other devices that we have there, and see it live in action for yourself. Handing it over to Annie. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Thanks, Shawn. So you’ve also told us that you want more flexibility to tailor your payment system to support your unique needs. So Terminal offers a range of integration options, from integrating the Terminal SDK into your custom application to connecting to third-party software like Oracle using prebuilt integrations. For those of you using third-party software, we’ve heard from you about the challenges of integrating new providers. 

They can take a really long time to implement, and require a lot of manual dev effort. That’s why we’re building more interoperability with other software platforms to help you go live faster. So if you use third-party software today and want to use Stripe, you can use one of our many prebuilt integrations with platforms like Adobe, Oracle, or Retail Realm. Or you can use our partnership with FreedomPay, a leading payment gateway that adds more than a thousand additional integrations with point-of-sale software and hardware. 

And for those of you building your own custom point-of-sale app, we make it easy to customize your buying experiences. So Terminal enables you to collect tips, to collect phone numbers and email addresses for loyalty programs, and to collect signatures for consent, all directly on one of our smart readers. 

And if you’re looking for an all-in-one experience, we can enable you to run your entire custom-built application directly on the reader using apps on devices. So think restaurants taking orders and checking out at table side, or retail shops that want a sleeker experience at the counter with fewer devices. And you can do all of this on the Stripe-designed readers like you see here, and as of today, you can do all of this on third-party hardware, starting with Verifone. 

We are so excited about this announcement. This immediately expands our portfolio of devices to include things like an outdoor weatherized device, a device with a built-in printer, and a traditional multilane device for those larger countertop experiences. And I’m also really excited about the discussions we’re having with other providers to add more integrations and more devices soon. 

But no matter how you choose to integrate, or which devices you choose to use, we know that you want to get started quickly with minimal dev work. So let me hand it back to Shawn to show you how some of our most innovative users are integrating with Terminal and remotely deploying custom experiences to the readers in just days. 

SHAWN RAZEK: So imagine you want to deploy that custom experience to a payments reader that’s an EMV-certified reader that supports dip, tap, and swipe. 

You can update your existing Android application to support our apps on devices functionality in less than 10 lines of code, again, leveraging the Terminal SDK. So I’ll show you that here. The app that we had showed off earlier, you can see here the code base that is in white. And then we are adding just a few lines of code to support apps and devices that you see here in pink. And so with just four lines, we’re able to use that same exact application across our Tap to Pay devices, our Stripe smart readers, as well as the Verifone devices that Annie had just mentioned. 

So the beauty of not having to have multiple applications and manage that, you only have to use one with Stripe. So now I’ve integrated Terminal, and I want to deploy it to one of my readers. And since we’re Stripe, we’re going to do this live. And we’re going to do this in less than a minute. So in the actual real world, you don’t need IT to be on-site to deploy apps or get your reader started with Stripe. You don’t need a lengthy instruction manual. It’s just going to be a few clicks, and we’re going to show you that right now. 

I’ve already uploaded my application to the Stripe Dashboard, and it’s been signed and approved and ready for me to deploy. So I’m the store manager now—I went from being a developer to the store manager—and I have my Stripe Reader S700 right here, and I’ve generated this three-word pairing code that you can see here on the screen. And I’m going to use this to assign it to my Stripe account. But you can actually also use the device’s serial number to register the device, eliminating the need for anyone to actually be on-site for this step, which is a great out-of-box experience for our users. 

So let’s pop over to the Stripe Dashboard. I’m going to register that reader, entering that three-word code that you saw on the screen. We’ll give the device a name, and I’ll assign it to a location. And this is just usually a physical location in which the reader is going to be held at. And what I’ve done ahead of time was I assigned the application to this location, as well as the configurations and settings. And so when I hit “register,” the device is going to start automatically downloading that app as well as those settings. 

So let’s do it live and see how it goes. 

[VIDEO]

Just like that, we’re off to the races. We’re downloading. And I’m doing this on the new Reader S700 that you see here, but as I had mentioned earlier, we also support apps on devices in this customized experience on the new Verifone readers, as well as future partners that we bring on board. And users like Dripos are leveraging apps on devices on the Stripe Reader S700 as well in coffee shops to support table-side ordering and to save on countertop space. 

And we’re done. I was not timing that, but I’m pretty sure that was faster than 60 seconds. And we did that all through the Stripe Dashboard. So speaking of the Stripe Dashboard, I want to pop over to that again. You know, if you have a mixed fleet of readers, that typically means you have different dashboards, different troubleshooting processes, and different tools to manage all of those devices, but not with Stripe. With Stripe, you have a fully integrated device management solution. 

So you can see here how I’m able to manage and see my Verifone and my Stripe readers all in a single place, get a quick check on the status, as well as other relevant information at a high level, all here. And I had mentioned configurations a little bit earlier. And if I want to go and configure any of these devices, I can do so without any code necessary. In just a couple of clicks, I can set the device’s splash screen, Wi-Fi, offline mode, the reboot time, and tipping, all with just a couple of clicks. 

And as we implement new features and new functionality, we’re going to make sure that all of our users can implement this with just a couple of clicks, no code necessary, which allows you to shorten your development times and get new features and functionality out to your customers more quickly. And so Stripe’s device management solution is cloud-based. It allows you to deploy, manage, and troubleshoot your readers all from a single pane of glass. So let’s go back to that device. I want to show off another live demo. 

So I’ve gone from being the developer to being the store manager, and now I’m a barista. And we have Annie here, and she is coming in for her daily mocha. And she heard about our new coffee-bag-of-the-month club that we have, where every single month we send a new bag of beans to her front step, and she wants to give that a try. And I’m going to be able to do that in one single transaction—and we’ll show you that now. I’m going to add that mocha, and then in the same transaction, I’ll add the coffee bag of the month. 

I need to add Annie as a customer. You know, I’m familiar with her, she comes here often, but let’s just make sure she’s in our system. She’s right there—I could have easily added her if she wasn’t—and what you see here is in the cart, she’s going to pay for that mocha now, and then leveraging Stripe Billing, we’re going to collect payment up front, and then we’ll bill her later when we send out that first bag. And so we’re going to go ahead and collect payment. 

And this time, again, I’m going to use a mobile wallet, but you can easily use a card and dip it. I’ll tap it right here on the screen. And just like that, the payment’s complete. And so we’ve done two things here. The first thing, as I mentioned, Annie’s paid for her mocha, so she can go down the line and wait for her mocha. And the second thing is we’ve actually saved the mobile wallet credentials, and leveraging Stripe Billing, we’ll bill her the next time when we send that first bag of beans to her doorstep. 

And as Annie had mentioned earlier, Stripe is the first major provider to enable users to save that mobile wallet for future use. And so Annie, go ahead and go get your mocha, and we’ll send you your beans. The email is in your inbox with all the details. And back to you. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Great. All right. Thank you so much, Shawn. So what you’ve seen is how Stripe enables you to unify your customer experiences and customize those experiences for your particular business. Now, let’s welcome to the stage three Stripe users: Nick Merwin from Buck Mason, Mike DeSimone from NewStore, and Julia Edwards-Smith from Xero. All right. Thank you three for joining us. I am so excited to hear your stories. So before we jump in, would each of you just share in one or two sentences how you use Stripe Terminal today? 

NICK MERWIN: Sure. Yeah. We use Stripe Terminal at our 40 retail locations, with more on the way, and it’s about 2 terminals per location. And they’re hooked up to MacBook Airs that are sitting out on the floor that are running my browser-based point of sale. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Great. Mike? 

MIKE DESIMONE: You did get it out in two sentences. Well done. 

So we’re a little newer to the Stripe family. And for those of you who may not be familiar, NewStore, like Stripe, is obsessed. We provide a unified commerce platform to global retailers. Our customers are UNTUCKit, LEGO stores, and a few others. And like Stripe, we’re obsessed with bringing the online and the store experience together in a really consistent way. So we’ve partnered with Stripe now to bring NewStore payments to our customer base. 

Because there’s a lot of complex flows that really are supported very well on a global basis, and we want to make sure we’re able to deliver that experience. So Terminal is a really big part of what we’re doing overall. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Great, and Julia. 

JULIA EDWARDS-SMITH: Awesome. Yeah, so at Xero, we offer our small business customers and our accountants more ways to get paid through Xero’s online invoice payments, powered by Stripe, of course. And that’s through credit card, debit card, digital wallet, buy now, pay later, ACH. 

And also, most excitedly, we launched Tap to Pay, and it’s now live in Australia, the UK, and it’s rolling out in the US as we speak. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Excellent. All right, let’s dive into a little more detail. We’ll start with you, Nick. Buck Mason was actually one of the first retailers to sign with Stripe Terminal back in 2019, but you had been taking in-person payments since 2013. So what initially brought you to Stripe? 

NICK MERWIN: Yeah. So back in 2015, I set out to build Buck Mason an inventory management system that was a little bit different—that treated every unit like a row in the database as opposed to a number on a product. And then it made sense to build a point of sale on top of that to have tight integration with inventory levels and management. And we were a direct-to-consumer native brand for the first couple of years, used Stripe Checkout online. I had always been a huge Stripe fan for the API documentation and client libraries, ergonomics, version stability, etc.

And so it made sense to just use the Stripe Checkout and Elements on the point of sale. That meant that I had to use a USB card reader in order to get customers’ card data into the browser, which was not great, and I had always dreaded needing to rip that out to support contactless. And as Apple Pay and the like became more popular, it was becoming more and more ominous of a thing that I would need to do. 

But then cut to hearing about Stripe’s new Terminal offering. At the time, it was a revelation when I heard that it could run, connect to the browser via JavaScript SDK, so I wouldn’t need to change anything about the point of sale. I could keep our custom-built point of sale, keep iterating on it, and use the terminal for contactless. 

So that really has been, over the last six years, one of the key reasons why we’ve been able to keep iterating on our system. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Excellent. All right. Julia, you shared a story about one of your small business customers who teaches people to ride horses. And in fact, that video ran before the product keynote this morning. Can you tell us a little bit about the story behind this user, and how Xero is helping her? 

JULIA EDWARDS-SMITH: Yeah. This is an awesome story. So hopefully you all saw the video, and if not, pop over to the commerce booth with Xero and check it out. 

But yeah, [Christine], she owns her own equestrian business, so she competes herself and she provides horse-riding lessons in Australia. And before offering Xero’s Tap to Pay on iPhone, of course, powered by Stripe, her days looked vastly different. So she would spend a few hours every morning creating invoices, sending payment reminders, and reconciling her accounts. 

Which really took valuable time, I guess, away from what she loved most, which was her clients and, of course, her horses. And I guess she found the payment process really challenging. So she’d do the riding lessons, she’d go back to her office, take off her boots, and she’d have to create invoices, and then she’d wait and wait for payments, which could take weeks, months. And this unpredictable cash flow made it really hard to manage her business. 

So since offering Tap to Pay on iPhone, she can now take payments on the spot, and we even joke because she takes them on the horse occasionally. And this means that once her clients are finished, they use their physical card or their phone, they tap her iPhone because they have the Xero mobile accounting app, and the payment’s processed instantly. The transaction’s automatically recorded in Xero, and it’s automatically reconciled. 

And so, you know, in Christine’s own words, she’s got heaps more time back. She said she saves, on average, two to three hours per day, which she can spend, you know, with her clients, her horses, less time chasing payments, and more time doing what she loves. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: I love that. 

JULIA EDWARDS-SMITH: Yeah. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Yes, yes, I love that. So that’s the concrete reason that we do so much of this, is to help our customers and our users live better lives. So I love that story, thank you. This next one is for you, Mike. NewStore powers a lot of well-known larger brands, and I understand you’re new to Stripe. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing to unify commerce for your users? 

MIKE DESIMONE: Yeah. So, you know, I think we all as consumers shop in an omnichannel kind of way in terms of our expectations. And often retailers fall short of delivering against them—not yours, of course. But you know, we’ve all been there, right, when we sort of buy something on the website and try and return it to the store, and we get told this is a franchise store, or you can’t return it here, or something along those lines. 

And even if you’re good at it as a retailer, often my understanding in talking with folks in the industry is that it might be great on the consumer side, but it’s a mess on the backend, and all the reconciliation and the inventory tracking, all of those things. So our goal is really to make all of that as seamless as possible, both for the retailer and for the consumer, so that the expectations line up with the actual service delivery in a way that is sustainable, cost-effective, and also global.  

That’s another really big part, and one of the reasons we wanted to partner with Stripe is that a lot of our customers, for example, Veronica Beard, wanted to expand to the UK. It’s super easy to do on a platform like ours. One of the things that’s really tough, though, is the payments piece, right. And being able to do that easily without having to go through a lot of compliance hurdles to open bank accounts and all the other pieces that have to come along with that. So we think that’s a really important part of our value prop in terms of helping our customers not just expand internationally and be able to take, you know, global brands, but also local payments, and kind of all the other pieces that go with that in terms of international expansion. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Great. Well, thank you. And speaking of international expansion, Julia, Xero also has a big global footprint. Looking across regions, what are you hearing from your users about how they want to get paid? 

JULIA EDWARDS-SMITH: Yeah, so when we talk to small businesses, our customers globally, what we hear consistently is really three related payment challenges. So number one is they need to offer more ways for their customers to pay them, and they’re hearing it from their end customers—so the payers. And this is because the end customer payer preferences vary, too. So some customers want to pay in person through Tap to Pay. 

Other customers want to pay online through invoice payments—and that’s because they want to manage their own cash flow. And so what we see through our research is that a lot of the end payers become frustrated. So 38% become frustrated when the small businesses don’t offer the payment methods that they want, and actually a quarter will walk away from that business. And this is business I guess those small businesses can’t afford to lose. And then the second one is they are just really tired of chasing late payments. 

So [Izzy], she runs a pottery business in the UK, and she said my customers don’t want to receive many emails. They just want to get the payment done on the spot. Tap to Pay is absolutely perfect for that, and it means she can spend more energy on creating pots. And then the last one is really related to cash flow. 

So through our research, we find that globally, small businesses, 60% of them are getting paid one month or more later. And this then has a flow on impact to paying employees, paying suppliers. And so one of our customers, [Steve], he runs a legal services platform actually in Utah, and he said by offering more ways to pay, I’ve actually reduced my wait times from 6 months down to 45 days—so that’s more than 2 times faster.

So yeah, he’s spending less time chasing payments, and more time to focus on what he wants to do like growing his business.

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Great. All right. Thank you. Okay. Back to you, Nick—and you’re a little bit of the voice of the developer in this panel today. You’ve now been using Stripe for six years, Stripe Terminal for six years. Why do you continue to choose to use Stripe and continue to use some of our newer products and devices? 

NICK MERWIN: Yeah, I think one of the main reasons is that I’ve never had to really update the integration code over the last six years. And to me, that’s kind of a developer dream, that it’s just going to continue working. APIs aren’t going to be broken over time, and I’m never going to have a fire drill, like something just stopped working for new release reasons. And because of that, the hardware improvements just come for free, essentially. 

And I love that I can just rest easy at night knowing that there’ll probably be a better version of the readers and the hardware pieces coming out in the future. And so for Buck Mason, as we grew from 0 to 40 stores, that really paid dividends, I think, that—the stability of it. Because we never had to look at switching out our POS at some arbitrary growth milestone. 

And just in general, Stripe being a foundational building block of our business, I think when anybody can kind of vibe code up a point solution in a weekend, it’s the inventory management and the transactional management systems of record that are the most important pieces. And so for us, my system, code name [Pima] and Stripe together are just that perfect combination for me. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Great. Love to hear that. Okay. Mike, I’d love to leave this audience with one big idea to take away. Looking ahead, what emerging trends do you see in payments for NewStore, and what are you doing to adapt for that? 

MIKE DESIMONE: Can I give you two? 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Sure. 

MIKE DESIMONE: And they’ll be very on theme for the conference if you’ve been going to the sessions. And I don’t think I had the words for this before I came to the conference, so thank you, but agentic commerce is just massive, I think, in terms of all the—if you were here for the session before this with Visa, it was—I think that’s amazing. 

And it sort of dislocates, again, to another channel where people are going to be—consumers are going to go on to shop, and being able to get into that. And the other one I think that’s super interesting is stablecoin, and how we can use that both in the consumer environment for pay in and also B2B transactions. So I think both of those are super interesting, and I’ve been Slacking like crazy to the team since I’ve been here about it. 

ANNIE SCHMIDT: Excellent. Right on message. Thank you, Mike.