They searched for how to accept credit cards on a website, how to charge customers every month, how to send an invoice that someone can pay online, or how to refund an order. Stripe answers all of those, and it does it through APIs that your website, your billing software, the platform you sell on, or an AI assistant can call for you. Understanding what those APIs can do helps you know what to ask of whoever builds or runs your store. What Stripe does Stripe describes itself as online payment processing for internet businesses, a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for online businesses of all sizes. Stripe covers a lot of ground, from one-time payments to recurring billing, invoices, tax and even issuing your own cards, so it helps to break it down by the job you are trying to get done.