As we expand the range of payment types that we support, we’ve released a new API version to unify the interface across payments of all types.

Globally, credit cards are the source of most online payments but they’re far from ubiquitous. Local payment mechanisms (such as China’s prominent e-wallets) power commerce in markets around the world. Meanwhile, novel payment types, from digital currencies to Apple Pay, are establishing new standards for online transactions.

In accepting these new instruments, there’s a lot to be excited about: broader global reach, increased revenue, and improved user experience. We want to make supporting them as easy as possible—hence building this unified API. For essentially all purposes, a payment is a payment regardless of where it came from. Payments of all types behave identically in the API and Dashboard.

Here’s a quick overview of the new API version:

Here is an example of creating a charge in the new API version:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges \
   -u sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2: \
   -d source=aliacc_4hzzUhIjJ9sZZv \
   -d amount=1000 \
   -d currency=usd

{
  "id": "ch_15aZNk2eZvKYlo2CW82HVvQf",
  "object": "charge",
  "amount": 1000,
  "currency": "usd",
  "source": {
    "id": "aliacc_4hzzUhIjJ9sZZv",
    "object": "alipay_account",
    "created": 1424987420,
    "username": "maidongxi@example.com",
    "reusable": true,
    ...
  },
  ...
}

Switching to the source property means that you don’t need additional code changes to accept the new payment types that we add over time. We’ve made this switch as easy as possible: old API versions include both the old and new properties on all responses. For instance, if you charge a card on an old API version then the charge object will have identical card and source properties. If you charge an Alipay account on an old API version then the card property will be null and the source property will be the Alipay account.

If you have questions or feedback about this change, then we’d love to hear from you!

Outdated card details are a big problem for online businesses. If your customers get a new card from their banks (or the number or expiry date changes), they have to manually re-add it to every service or the service stops working. It’s frustrating for customers, and loses paying customers for businesses needlessly.

We’ve rolled out support for handling new cards nicely. Now, when you save a customer with Stripe, their card will continue to work even if the physical card gets replaced by the bank. Stripe works directly with card networks so that your customers can continue using your service without interruption.

There’s no extra work required, and this feature works with most MasterCard, Discover, and Visa cards—without this improvement, over half of the cards stored with Stripe in the last year would stop working by 2016 if they weren’t updated.

{
  "id": "evt_5WmzN8V26JZQ1B",
  "type": "customer.source.updated",
  "object": "event",
  "data": {
    "object": {
      "id": "card_0ggBPvHF5HODr5",
      "object": "card",
      "last4": "3110",
      "exp_month": 11,
      "exp_year": 2017,
      "customer": "cus_8h42pwFc41m2",
      ...
    },
    "previous_attributes": {
      "exp_year": 2014
    }
  },
  ...
}

The saved card only stays working as long as the credit or debit card account stays open. Your customers won’t have to worry about being billed after they’ve canceled their subscription or after they’ve closed a credit card account.

We hope this makes life easier for you and your users alike. If you have any questions or feedback, get in touch!

Using data from across the Stripe network, we’ve developed a machine learning system that evaluates charges in real-time and blocks those that are almost certainly fraudulent. By analyzing hundreds of different characteristics pertaining to each payment, these algorithms have already shielded businesses on Stripe from millions of attempted fraudulent charges.

Starting today, you can help improve these models. By letting us know when we’ve missed a charge that you believe to be fraudulent, or declined one that you think is legitimate, you can help train a model that’s optimized for your business. This ensures that the protection you receive will get better over time.

In practice, it’s very simple. In the dashboard, you can now:

• Report and refund charges you believe to be fraudulent—just follow the “Report fraudulent payment” link when viewing a charge.
• Mark as safe charges that Stripe blocked as suspected fraud. Charges we believe to be fraudulent will appear with a status of “Blocked” in the payments list and have a prominent message on the payment detail page. If you mark one of these charges as safe, you can retry it—we will not attempt to block it again.

There’s also equivalent functionality available in the API—check out the documentation for more details.

Over time, businesses on Stripe should not have to think about fraud and disputes. By enabling this feedback loop—between you and other businesses built on Stripe on the one hand, and our fraud detection infrastructure on the other—we’re confident that we’ll be able to deliver significant improvements in the future.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on these tools, or other thoughts about how we could better help you block fraud, please drop me a line.

Disputed payments—"chargebacks"—can be awkward and time-consuming. We’re taking advantage of the data we’ve seen across millions of transactions to make handling disputes easier and quicker, and to maximize the chance that you win disputes.

As much as we’d like these changes to be helpful if you face a dispute, we’re working to reduce disputes for all our users—we actually hope you have to use these tools as little as possible. If you’ve got any feedback, let us know.

We’ve added two new tools to the Dashboard to help you keep track of activity on your account.

First, it’s now easier to see activity on your account (and monitor for potentially unauthorized actions) with the security history overview. Your overview will show recent actions from all of your team members—from password and bank account changes to suspicious logins or data exports.

Second, you can now see in your logs which of your team members performed any given action through the Dashboard. This should both increase security and reduce confusion when multiple team members are managing an account.

As always, please contact us if you’re ever worried that your account has been compromised. And of course, if you have any feedback, feel free to reach out!

Starting at 10am Pacific Time this morning, you can watch The Interview at SeeTheInterview.com, powered by Stripe. The Interview was originally intended to be broadly available in theaters, but its release was curtailed after a number of distribution partners backed out.

We’re happy to be involved because we think it’s important that the internet remains an impartial platform. We’re proud to work with organizations defending digital freedoms such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. We’ve partnered with Chilling Effects to prevent takedown notices becoming a censorship tool and supported net neutrality to try to keep businesses on a level playing field.

We don’t always endorse what businesses sell through Stripe, but we do think it’s critical that we and our peers don’t act as gatekeepers for what is and isn’t acceptable content.

Online freedom isn’t automatic, and it’s only through active effort that the internet will stay an open platform for creativity and innovation. We take our role seriously.

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