Chris Motola

If you are new to using Stripe for your business, you may be wondering what the steps to set up your Stripe account are. Below, we’ll walk you through setting up a Stripe account and what you can use it for.

The average worker may be wondering what kind of impact this recession could have on job security. If you’re a construction worker, auto technician, sales rep, fabricator, or part of middle management, you may want to have a backup plan if things take a turn for the worse, particularly if you live in one of the states hit hardest by recent inflation. Medical professionals, public employees, and truckers have less to worry about.

Inflation is taking a big bite out of Americans’ purchasing power, but residents of Southern states may be feeling the hit to their wallets more intensely than elsewhere. Merchant Maverick’s inaugural report, The 10 U.S. States Where Inflation Is Hitting Consumers The Hardest, looks not only at where inflation is rising the fastest, but how much existing factors within a given state may contribute to the stress on a household budget.

In Merchant Maverick’s inaugural data report on The Best States In Which To Survive Recession, our analysis found that the states in the best condition to mitigate the effects of a recession aren’t where you might expect. Most of them, as it turns out, are in the Heartland.

Square offers one of the quickest and easiest setup processes in payment processing and is one of our favorite solutions for small businesses. Still, there may come a time when your business outgrows Square or no longer needs credit card processing. When that happens, you’ll want to know how to cancel your Square account.

For businesses that make infrequent and small transactions, Cash App is a wonderful convenience. You’ll be able to take Cash App and credit card transactions with minimal fuss and no hardware expenditures outside of the mobile device you’re already using. The flat 2.75% transaction fee recalls the old days of Square; with no flat markup, it’s possible to make very small transactions economically.

Stripe Payments can be a great tool for tech-savvy nonprofits, particularly those that take most of their donations online. Stripe’s nonprofit discount is significant and competitive; just keep in mind that not all donations qualify for the discounted rate.

While they’re still a bit rough around the edges, crypto payments can be a cheap way to process non-cash payments at a time when the costs of credit card transactions are ballooning. Just make sure you select a provider with a solid reputation and low costs that offer you the amount of exposure to crypto that you want.

Shopify Payments is Shopify’s built-in payment processing feature, which allows you to accept credit and debit cards, as well as additional payment methods. By default, Shopify Payments is a white label version of Stripe and has most of that payment processor’s strengths and weaknesses. Learn more about Shopify Payments and how to set it up for your small business.

Novel payment methods seem to be arriving at a faster and faster pace. One you may have heard of recently is called a payment link, a way to bill your customers through their mobile devices (or email, if you or they are feeling retro).