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Introducing the Billing customer portal

Theodora Chu on June 29, 2020

Every recurring revenue business works with customers who want to change a subscription, update a payment method, or view their billing history. But there’s a dilemma most startups face: Divert engineering resources to build this functionality, or not build it at all and rely on support to manually manage updates. The first option slows down your business by taking focus off your core product, while the other provides a less-than-ideal customer experience and doesn’t scale.

That’s why we built the new Billing customer portal.

Stripe Billing is already the fastest way for businesses to set up subscriptions or invoices. The customer portal makes it even easier to create a great experience for your customers while minimizing engineering investment.

Give your customers more control

The customer portal is a secure, Stripe-hosted page that lets your customers manage their subscriptions and billing details. Your customers can:

  • Upgrade, downgrade, or cancel a subscription
  • Update their payment methods
  • View their billing history

customer portal screen

Get started fast

The customer portal is fast to configure, preview, test and deploy—most of our beta users went from start to finish in under an hour. Check out the integration guide for step-by-step instructions.

Tuple integrated the customer portal to allow their customers to easily update a credit card. Ben Orenstein, the CEO of Tuple, noted “it was a no-brainer for us to use Stripe’s pre-built solution. This isn’t our core competency, so it would have been distracting for us to scope and build this ourselves.”

Customize to match your brand

Your customer portal should feel like a natural extension of your product experience. You can customize the appearance of your customer portal by editing the logo, headline, brand color, and accent color.

customization controls

Get the little details right by adding links to your terms of service, privacy policy, and other helpful info for your customers.

We update and iterate so you don’t have to

Integrating the customer portal unlocks a roadmap of new features with no additional engineering work. We already have several improvements in progress, such as support for updating billing & shipping addresses.

The customer portal was also built to help you stay ahead of ever-evolving global requirements. Recent examples of rule changes include Strong Customer Authentication in Europe and updated rules from Visa for free trial and promotion-driven subscriptions. The logic to handle these regulatory and network requirements is built into Billing and the customer portal by default. Rules will continue to change—we’ll do the work to help keep your setup compliant.

To start using Stripe Billing, visit the docs. If you already use Billing, check out the customer portal integration guide to get set up.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback—we’d love to hear from you.

June 29, 2020

Opposing racism

Patrick Collison on June 2, 2020

Racism is antithetical to Stripe’s mission. Our founding purpose is the broader, fairer distribution of opportunity—opportunity accessible to and inclusive of everyone, everywhere.

While no person’s or company’s statement will change society by itself, that limitation shouldn’t paralyze. Social change requires coordinated, broad participation.

We share the deep sadness that so many are currently feeling and the upset at the injustices that lie at the root. Too many innocent people have lost their lives. Too many sickening murders, most recently that of George Floyd, attest to brutal and unjustified treatment. Too many Stripe employees have themselves been the victims of unfair treatment, discrimination, harrassment, and bigotry. And while the US is the current focal point, we are a global company, and issues around race persist as problems in every part of the world.

While it’ll take us time to identify the highest-impact actions, we don’t want to wait to do anything. In the immediate term, we are going to waive $1M of fees to nonprofits that are raising money to combat systemic racism, with a particular bias towards those relevant to the current moment. We will also contribute $100,000 each to five organizations working on reforming US policing practices or the criminal justice system.

Inside Stripe, the fraction of US employees who are Black is substantially lower than that of the American population. We wish it were otherwise and are going to increase our efforts to hire and develop Black employees in all teams and at all levels. Our goal is to meaningfully grow representation over the coming year.

Stripe won’t solve these problems alone. But we share the concern motivating so many others and would like to make crystal clear our support for building a society that solves these challenges, and where safety, security, and access to opportunity are properly accessible to all.

June 2, 2020

Stripe's remote engineering hub, one year in

Jay Shirley on May 28, 2020

Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year—and did. They now work across every engineering group at Stripe. Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of permanently remote engineers, up to 22% of our engineering population. We also hired more remote employees across all other teams, and tripled the number of remote Stripes across the company.

Like many organizations, Stripe has temporarily become fully remote to support our employees and customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributed work isn’t new to Stripe. We’ve had remote employees since inception—and formally began hiring remote engineers in 2013. But as we grew, we developed a heavily office-centric organizational structure. Last year, we set out to rebalance our mix of remote and centralized working by establishing our virtual hub. It’s now the backbone of a new working model for the whole company.

We think our experience might be interesting, particularly for businesses that haven’t been fully distributed from the start or are considering flipping the switch to being fully remote, even after the pandemic. We’ve seen promising gains in how we communicate, build more resilient and relevant products, and reach and retain talented engineers. Here is what we learned.

Read more

May 28, 2020

Expanding support for JCB payments

Daniel Heffernan on May 27, 2020

JCB is a credit card network with over 135 million cardholders worldwide and a particularly high share-of-wallet in Japan. We have made JCB acceptance available to more businesses and decreased payout times.

Businesses using Stripe in Japan can now automatically accept payments with JCB, in most cases without any additional work.

One step closer to ubiquity

Technology on the internet tends to be available everywhere. Payments do not work like this, yet, but we are one step closer.

We are rolling out JCB acceptance to businesses in more countries, starting with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with more to come. This lets global businesses, from e-commerce sites in Canada to subscription services in Australia, easily transact with JCB cardholders.

Stripe is live in 39 countries today. We want every payment method, and feature of the platform, to be available everywhere we do business. This helps bring businesses transacting online to global parity, and brings them closer to their customers, even when they are oceans apart. We will continue working to expand access to JCB acceptance.

No assembly required

Stripe was the first payments company to defer underwriting for most businesses, letting them get started taking payments without a lengthy application and review process.

We have extended this experience to JCB. The onboarding is automatic after a Stripe account is activated and, in most cases, doesn’t require any additional steps from users.

The API call to charge a JCB card is identical to that for charging any other card, so users should not need to make any code changes to support these customers.

Tremendous opportunity for global businesses

E-commerce continues to expand rapidly in Japan, and cross-border e-commerce is increasing at an even faster second derivative. We have seen annualized growth rates of over 45% in international payments from users in Japan since 2018. This explosion in user demand is now addressable by global businesses using the same payment platform they use for other payments, without requiring any code changes or, in most cases, back office work.

Infrastructure bridges gaps between nations. Fittingly, this engineering work was also done by teams spanning the globe, led by our engineers in Singapore and Tokyo. We will have more products built with local sensibilities to share soon.

May 27, 2020

Photo of Caoimhe O'Regan

Stripe launches in five more European countries

Caoimhe O'Regan on May 27, 2020

Stripe is now generally available in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta. This means Stripe can now support businesses in 39 countries (29 in Europe) with our complete payments platform, enabling them to sell to customers around the globe.

Stripe has been investing in our European engineering hub since 2018, and this launch was built almost entirely by those teams. That’s everything from new integrations with financial institutions to extending support for Stripe’s products.

Europe has a thriving startup ecosystem and one of the highest densities of software engineers anywhere in the world. Investing in global engineering hubs closer to users helps us better understand and build for their needs. This launch is the result of feedback from a number of businesses across Europe—MEWS, Ramon Nastase, Aesthetic by Science, and Mana are just a few of the many companies that helped shape this product during its beta phase.

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the shift from offline to online commerce, making the need for financial infrastructure and accessibility more urgent than ever. In the past few months, European entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe have already processed hundreds of millions of euros in payments on Stripe. We’re glad we can support these businesses and are working diligently to make Stripe available to every business across Europe.

May 27, 2020