SAN FRANCISCO — Stripe today launched Stripe Elements, the fastest and simplest way for businesses to create modern checkout experiences for their customers. Elements are building blocks for a fast, clean purchase flow. Elements can be combined and customized in any number of ways, but the hard work within each component is handled by Stripe. By automatically optimizing for mobile devices, localized cards, alternative payment methods, and more, Stripe Elements give businesses a way to achieve higher conversions with less work.

Even in 2017, the simple act of paying for something on a website or app is often unnecessarily laborious. Indeed, almost three-quarters of mobile shopping carts are abandoned before completing a purchase, largely due to clunky checkout experiences. To address this, businesses previously had to choose between building something quickly (often using an entirely pre-built payment form) or building something custom (often spending weeks of engineering effort and introducing dozens more variables that are easily overlooked). In fact, a detailed review of the top 100 commerce sites globally reveals:

• 72 had three or more errors in their checkout flows—points of friction that could be easily tweaked to expedite purchases for their customers.
  
• Almost half did not have auto-fill set up correctly for entering billing information saved in the browser.
  
• One-fifth made mobile checkout significantly harder by not providing a numerical keypad for entering credit card numbers.
  

With Elements, businesses no longer have to choose. With minimal effort, businesses can now implement a fast, modern purchase flow that’s completely customizable and that draws on Stripe’s experience powering payments for hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world.

Businesses on Stripe can now use Elements to:

1. Fully customize their payment flows: Elements allows businesses to tailor everything from specific colors and fonts, to shapes and shadows, to overall layout (such as collecting card details in one field or multiple).
   
2. Minimize integration work: Elements can be created with just a few lines of code, most of which can be copied directly from Stripe’s documentation. Customization work requires changing a few parameters, not building something new from scratch. New businesses can be up and running in a matter of minutes.
   

3. Increase conversions: Elements addresses the most commonly overlooked points of friction in a checkout flow with smart solutions for which no detail is too small. These include:

   *Mobile responsiveness: Elements automatically detects and optimizes for mobile devices, adjusting to different screen sizes and displaying the numeric keyboard whenever relevant (for card number, expiration, zip code, etc).
   *Real-time validation: Elements provides real-time feedback as a customer types to ensure errors are caught early (rather than after they’ve clicked “purchase.”)
   *Localization: Based on the country of a customer’s card, Elements will dynamically detect which inputs are needed (for example, showing “zip code” to U.S. cardholders and “postcode” to UK cardholders).
   *Additional payment methods: With a single integration, businesses can use Elements to accept credit cards or alternative payment methods such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, or any other wallets supported by the Payment Request API.
   *Autofill: Elements ensures that autofill works consistently and correctly across platforms and browsers, so customers can check out faster no matter what device they’re using.

In addition, Elements gives businesses peace of mind when it comes to security and compliance. The core payment fields are served by Stripe, so sensitive payment information never touches a business’ own servers and is instead transmitted directly to Stripe to be securely stored and tokenized. This means businesses using Elements qualify for the easiest form of PCI compliance (SAQ-A), even under the latest PCI guidelines.

“Stripe powers hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world, from Fortune 500 companies to the most innovative startups.” said Lachy Groom, head of payments products at Stripe. “With Elements, we’ve drawn from that experience to build the best possible payment flow for the modern internet company, where Stripe handles all the nitty-gritty work behind the scenes, such as optimizing for different mobile devices, payment methods, or geographies. With two-thirds less code than would be typically required, businesses can implement and fully customize Stripe Elements in a matter of minutes, immediately offering their customers great checkout experiences.”

“A streamlined checkout flow that optimizes based on context is essential for businesses to increase conversions and ultimately build lasting relationships with their customers,” said Jordan McKee, principal analyst at 451 Research. “Unfortunately, designing a customized purchase experience that minimizes friction has traditionally been a resource-intensive process fraught with complexity. With Elements, Stripe looks to break this paradigm by democratizing access to a fast, customizable and fully PCI compliant checkout flow with minimal implementation effort.”

Starting today, Elements is available to all Stripe users globally. To learn more, visit stripe.com/elements.