> it's difficult for me to see exactly where it would make my life easier or better
As a shopper it won't. Stripe is not targeted at shoppers but at website developers who want to implement credit card payments in a sane and easy way.
As a user, you should not care whether the website is using Stripe or not (although their UX is usually nicer by default and their development guidelines help the implementation be more secure). The added value to you is that it is easy for the developer to implement credit card payments the right/secure way, therefore giving you more payment options.
As a developer, I welcome this open armed. I've come into contact with several payment gateways (GMO/Econtext/F-regi) while working in Japan, and all of their API's have been an atrocity, with lackluster documentation.
Sure, but it's a different sort of protection, and although it's better in some ways (if you do things right, you can often get your money back for an existing transaction), it doesn't necessarily offer the same peace of mind as the more fundamental protection offered by a "push-only" system (bank transfers) compared to a "pull" system (credit cards).
In particular, a common worry with credit cards is that if you use them often for small transactions, your info will eventually fall into the wrong hands and then all bets are off.
In terms of peace-of-mind, there's a lot to be said for a system where payments are purely user-initiated...
[Presumably some variants on credit-cards can increase the security, e.g. generating a temporary card number when your bank offers such a feature, but these may lose some of the convenience advantages that are credit-cards' main selling point...]
There are a lot of these small craftsmen in Japan, specially in metal working, supplying parts notably for aeronautics and space industries. For example, the nose of every shinkansen bullet train is hand hammered to shape: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...
