Stripe,Tax,andCheckout:WhatUSE-CommerceFoundersNeedtoPlanFor

Stripe handles the actual payment processing and PCI-DSS compliance burden for card data, which is exactly why most e-commerce builds use it (or a similar processor) rather than handling raw card details directly — that would be a significantly larger compliance undertaking. What your developer builds is the integration layer: creating checkout sessions, handling webhooks for payment confirmation, and managing what happens in your own system once a payment succeeds or fails.

Webhook handling deserves specific attention — this is how your system reliably learns that a payment actually succeeded, and getting it wrong (missing events, not handling retries) is a common source of order-status bugs in e-commerce builds.

US sales tax varies by state, and determining what to collect depends on where you have "nexus" (a sufficient business presence) — a genuinely complex, state-by-state determination that shifts as your business grows. This is general technical background, not tax advice — a qualified accountant should confirm your specific sales tax obligations.

Many e-commerce builds integrate a dedicated tax calculation service rather than hand-building tax logic, since sales tax rules change frequently and a specialized service is built specifically to stay current with them — this is usually a better use of engineering time than maintaining tax logic in-house.

Plan explicitly for refund handling (full and partial), failed payment retry logic, and what happens to inventory when an order is refunded or fails after initially appearing to succeed — these edge cases are exactly where checkout bugs tend to surface in production, often discovered by a frustrated customer rather than in testing.