We increasingly rely on (and contribute back to!) a lot of open-source software to build Stripe, and we’d like to give back and get more people working on open-source.
Starting January, we’re hosting another Open-Source Retreat at Stripe. Just like last year, we’re looking for existing projects where these grants can make a large difference in spurring the development of a new feature or infrastructure.
We’ll host three to four developers at our office in SF for three months to work full-time on an open-source project. While we’ll ask that they give a couple of internal tech talks over the course of the program, the grant itself is no-strings-attached.
Selection process
We’ll select projects on based on their importance to the broader community, independently of Stripe itself. Applicants from any country are welcome and we’d love to fund people from backgrounds underrepresented in the open-source community. Here are the criteria we’ll use:
Impact of our grant. Does our grant have the ability to transform this project’s trajectory? Are you an influencer within the project? Will your ability to focus on it full-time move the project forward in some significant way?
Importance of the project. Is this a project that people already use and has attracted a lot of attention? If this project isn’t itself popular yet, how much potential does it have? Is it a project that, while possibly risky, would be particularly exciting if successful?
Likelihood of success. Is there a good plan for how these three months will be used? What indicators are there that you’ll be able to pull it off (obvious passion for the project, existing work on the project, previous work on similar projects)?
Selection team
Here's the team that will be reviewing your application:
Danielle
Evan
Kyle
Krithika
Michelle
Stan
Logistics
We want to provide everything needed to focus and have a substantial impact on an open-source project:
The program will run from January 15th until April 15th, 2016 at Stripe HQ in the Mission District of San Francisco.
We’ll provide $7,500 per month in addition to desk space at our office and meals during the week.
Application
Applications are now closed. Thanks to everyone who applied. We'll be contacting you individually soon!
We’re starting to add support for displaying Checkout in your customers’ preferred languages. In addition to English, Checkout now speaks Japanese, German, French, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch.
We tested this feature with over 220,000 customers across different types of businesses and found that displaying a translated Checkout converts significantly better for many companies—in particular, where the rest of their website is translated. For those sites, revenue from non-English speakers increased by between 7 and 12 percent—a huge jump for one tiny checkout change.
Based on our results, we strongly recommend you enable this feature if you already have a website in the eight languages we currently support.
You can opt in to using the translated version with a single line of code. If you’re using the simple integration, just pass data-locale="auto" into the <script> tag. If you have a custom integration, use locale: 'auto' when calling StripeCheckout.configure(). There’s more info in the docs.
This change illustrates part of our broader goal with Checkout: to deliver a constant stream of refinements that automatically improve your checkout flow and help you reach more customers.
If you notice anything surprising, or have questions or feedback, please let me know!
Starting today, you can add Amex Express Checkout to your site or app with a single code snippet.
American Express has partnered with Stripe to let over 20 million cardholders pay online and in apps using their existing American Express login, rather than entering their full credit card details.
When you integrate, American Express will also securely pass on useful customer information to you such as address, email, and phone number. They'll even automatically keep that info up to date. (You’ll get a customer.updated webhook.) You’ll have the latest information for your customers without having to prompt them to manually update their data on your site.
During our beta, we worked to make accepting Amex Express Checkout as straightforward as possible. To include the button, just configure the helper library with a client_id that you can generate in the Dashboard:
As with other payment types, you’ll get a card token that you can use to create charges. You’ll also see these payments alongside other payment types in the Dashboard or via the API.
At Stripe, we make extensive use of automated testing to help ensure
the stability and reliability of our services. We have expansive
test coverage for our API and other core services, we run tests on a
continuous integration server over every git branch, and we never deploy without green
tests.
We’ve been in beta in the Nordics for the past year. In that time, we’ve had the chance to work closely with a growing number of companies here to better understand the challenges they face to run a business in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
Starting today, any company in these countries can set up a Stripe account and accept live charges in minutes. As usual, all businesses can accept payments from customers around the world in over 135 currencies.
Based on our conversations with many of our beta users, we’re also updating our pricing for the countries in the region:
Denmark: 1.7% + 1.8kr for Danish cards and 2.9% + 1.8kr for international cards
Finland: 2.0% + 20c for Finnish cards and 2.9% + 20c for international cards
Norway: 2.4% + 2kr for Norwegian cards and 2.9% + 2kr for international cards
Sweden: 1.9% + 1.8kr for Swedish cards and 2.9% + 1.8kr for international cards
Thanks to the hundreds of beta users who’ve helped to shape our product for the Nordics. We’ve been delighted to work with a wide variety of companies to bring their businesses online—from Cancerfonden (Sweden’s largest non-profit organization for cancer research) to Tictail (a platform that lets users create and run beautiful online stores within minutes).
Now that we’re fully launched, we’re looking forward to seeing all the new experiences you’ll build with Stripe.
Upgrades! We love them. You know you’re doing something right when a user wants to pay more for your product. But upgrades can be tricky, too. If you prorate the change, your customers may be confused on how much they’ll be charged on their next bill.
We now offer a preview of upgrade charges for subscriptions before they happen. You can see how switching plans or changing quantities would impact a customer by querying the upcoming invoices endpoint. We’ll return an estimate of the user’s next invoice, including any applicable prorations. You can display this estimate to users to maximize the chance they finish their upgrade.
Here’s an example of what happens when you send a new subscription plan your customer is considering:
You can also estimate the charge for a subscription change at a specific point of time in the future. Just pass a proration_date when previewing the amount.
We hope this helps provide your customers with more predictable upgrades (or downgrades). If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know.
In 2012, we noticed that many of the most exciting Stripe users were building businesses that helped others accept money. Shopify was helping e-commerce businesses get started and Postmates was building a mobile restaurant delivery network. In October 2012, we launched Stripe Connect to allow these multi-sided platforms to connect with thousands of seller accounts on Stripe.
Plenty has changed since then. The number of these platforms has exploded: services like Instacart, Kickstarter, Shyp, Tilt, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and Handy. Stripe has helped over half a million sellers get paid on platforms like these. And we’ve learned a lot about the subtleties of each use case.
Regular businesses just need to accept money from buyers, but running one of these platforms is much more complex. They also have to verify seller identity (to comply with know-your-customer laws and to prevent fraud), collect and verify their sellers’ banking information, track seller earnings, help sellers get paid on the right schedule, handle IRS tax reporting requirements, and more. I get tired just thinking about it.
The new Stripe Connect is the result of everything we’ve learned from powering these platforms. The changes we’ve made make setting up accounts for sellers even easier—they don’t need to even come to Stripe. You can now support sellers in more countries. And Stripe helps with everything involved in operating the platform.
Managed accounts
In addition to connecting to regular Stripe accounts (which Connect has supported since 2012), we’re now enabling platforms to spin up and administer “managed accounts”. Managed accounts allow you to customize all aspects of the experience for sellers—from what the setup flow looks like and payment schedules to who pays fees and when info is collected. These managed accounts can be set up for sellers wherever Stripe is supported (18 countries, with more coming this year). This unifies our previously-separate “Transfers API” with Connect.
New Lightweight setup for sellers
With managed accounts, Stripe gets out of the way of your relationship with your sellers or contractors. You can fully customize how sellers join your platform and build very lightweight sign up flows. In fact, you can get a seller started with just a country and email address using the new accounts endpoint:
We’ll send back the seller’s account information, which you can use to start creating charges on their behalf right away. We’ll let you know via the account.updated webhook if and when you need to collect any additional info about your sellers.
When creating charges, you can also specify the seller receiving the funds. Stripe will handle paying out the seller on the schedule you specified, and you won’t need to manually reconcile payments and transfers, making accounting and bookkeeping easier:
Scaling businesses internationally can be pretty hard, but it’s especially difficult for platforms. Traditionally, supporting sellers in other countries required you to either run all international transactions through the U.S. (which meant more declined cards and currency conversion fees) or registering local business entities in every region supported.
With Connect, we’ve worked to help you provide a local experience for your sellers while keeping your code manageable and scalable. For example, you might need a Spanish crowdfunding campaign’s Número de Identificación Fiscal or an Australian boutique’s ABN before they can get paid. In all these cases, we’ll help you out and let you know what info to collect via the aptly-named fields_needed array on the account.
Update Build apps for Stripe users
As before, you can use Connect to get secure access to Stripe data, and use that to build dashboards, invoicing integrations, feature add-ons, and more. If you like being meta, you can now also create integrations specifically for platforms, such as the one built by QuickBooks for self-employed workers.
Pricing
Nearly all of Connect’s functionality is free. The cost for accepting payments remains the same. Setting up managed accounts costs just 0.5% of funds paid out—this flat rate includes ID verification, helping to generate tax documents where necessary, and even international accounts.
We’re thrilled to see diverse marketplaces and platforms being built and grown on Stripe.
Marketplaces have always been a big deal (just ask Bill Gurley), but we think that they’re likely to become more important still. As the rise of smartphones lets internet businesses make the leap from the virtual to the real world, we think that enormously successful marketplaces and platforms remain to be built. We look forward to building the most useful tools and APIs for them along the way.
Thanks very much to our beta users for their feedback which has helped us shape the product. If you have any questions, get in touch!
