[Silhouette]

If a user used Stripe "the chance that a visitor would abandon their donation at the Checkout step halved from 22% to 10%"

While that's an interesting data point, plausible explanations could be anything from very positive, such as

(a) Stripe's Checkout process being dramatically more effective for signed-in users, for example because of the reduced effort required to complete the transaction

to very negative, such as

(b) Stripe's Checkout process causing a horrible drop in conversions for users who aren't signed in, for example because of the added complexity that comes from their "remember me" mechanism or the unfamiliar branding.

It doesn't seem at all surprising that previous Stripe users would convert better with either of these relatively extreme explanations -- either those people had an easier interface to use, or they were necessarily already familiar with the Stripe brand.

[avibryant]

I take your point that there are a number of possible explanations (at varying levels of plausibility) for this effect, but to address a specific example you mention: whenever we change something significant in Checkout like adding the "remember me" option, we A/B test it, and if it did in fact cause a "horrible drop in conversions" we would absolutely not release it. (It doesn't).

[Silhouette]

whenever we change something significant in Checkout like adding the "remember me" option, we A/B test it, and if it did in fact cause a "horrible drop in conversions" we would absolutely not release it. (It doesn't).

With the greatest respect, while that may be true on balance over the entire population of Stripe-using businesses, it won't necessarily be true for all of them individually.

(I have inside knowledge of various businesses, at least one of which did switch from Checkout to Stripe.js for the kinds of reasons I mentioned before. However, I have no idea how well or otherwise any mostly small and UK-based companies I know about might represent your customer base as a whole, so I didn't want to be unfairly critical.)