Stripe Link Moving on Up

While Stripe Link has been quiet for a long time, it does appear that the profile of the payment method is increasing. Stripe is hiring for a Head of Consumer Marketing for Link on its website.

Reported facts include:

* Over 100 million consumers

* Millions more joining the network each month

That compares to 200M+ Shop Pay users (as reported in Feb by Shopify). It seems to me that Stripe Link is growing about 2x slower than Shop Pay -- at least on an order of magnitude -- and that Stripe would like to accelerate that.

While I can compare it to Shop Pay here, the real issue is Paypal. With a consumer-facing arm, Paypal has many more weapons to win a long-term war than Stripe does. So Stripe Link growth rates matter.

However, Stripe and Shopify and Paypal while overlapping and all are competing, they are also not 100% in competition -- likely all CEOs feel there can be multiple winners here.... so again, growth rates matter.

And while Paypal Branded Checkout is growing much slower than Shopify, it's also growing slower than Stripe Link too. Meaning ... Stripe wouldn't mind increasing its growth rate here.

Over the long term if you are close to the consumer you have more opportunities to increase your margin through ads, lending and other means than the alternative.