When it comes to payment integration / collecting payment for any application everyone thinks of integrating with some third party service that would do the job for them instead of reinventing the wheel because there is very very high need of security when it comes to receiving payments.

PayPal was the market leader in this space but it is quite complex in terms of managing the user account, recurring payments, shipping integration, tax integration etc. It is not that user friendly from a non-technical person’s point of view.

This is where Stripe comes into picture. It is far more user friendly, has a nicer user account’s page, provides shipping & tax integration via external shipping and tax service providers. It also handles recurring payments without any additional complexity.

I integrated both PayPal & Stripe for one of my application and found out that Stripe is much more easier to integrate from a developer’s perspective as well.

When you sign-up with Stripe, it also provides you guidance in test mode regarding what API calls from Stripe API to use using your test key, which you just need to enter into console to see it working and get a feel of it.

This was the most amazing thing for me to get me going. Just to make it clear once again, if you are logged-in into stripe and visit the getting started section in Developer Documention then it will use your test API key to guide you through its various API calls.

Though integrating Stripe was very fun but there were also some areas where I found it to be slightly less obvious about some of its features that I got to know after lot of searching in the docs (which I wasn’t able to find easily on googling). These are :

  1. Emails are to be turned ON seperately from the Account Settings section.

  2. Emails are not sent for test mode.

    To view emails for test accounts go to :

    Dashboard > Payments > click on any payment > view receipt

  3. Understand that you only need to use webhooks for behind-the-scenes transactions. The results of most Stripe requests—including charge attempts and customer creations—are reported synchronously to your code, and don’t require webhooks for verification. (For example, with a charge request, the charge will immediately succeed and a Charge object returned, or the charge will immediately fail and an exception will be thrown.)

Next, I want to highlight few points about shipping & tax integration.

For shipping & tax integration PayPal didn’t provide any integration with other third party shipping or tax service providers. Instead of re-inventing the wheel and create those services from scatch Stripe did a nice thing by providing seamless integration who have already specialized these fields.

Shipping Integration :

Stripe has partnered with EasyPost and Shippo to help you get shipping rates directly from USPS, UPS, FedEx and other carriers for your Stripe orders.

I integrated with EasyPost in my application and it was fairly easy. It was so seamless that I didn’t even looked into Shippo.

First you need to signup in Easypost from their signup page. Add the carrier account which you want to use and provide details related to the same in the form by selecting a carrier in Carrier Account section.

To use EasyPost using Ruby, install the easypost gem using the command :

gem install easypost

Sample code for the EasyPost :

You can inspect the EasyPost::Shipment object to check shipping options and rates.

You can call rates method on the order object shown in code snippet above to get the shipping rates.

If you have integrated Easypost in stripe then you need not require the above script to get the rates, you just need to pass the shipping option which you want to select which creating a Stripe::Order.

Tax Integration :

For tax integration, Stripe has partnered with Avalare, TaxJar and Taxamo. Since I was working a US based customer he suggested me to go integrate TaxJar since it is the most widely used in US.

The reason why we need to integrate with a third party service for tax calculation as well is : because in US tax rate is different in different states that too varies basing on the product category. Quoting the statement from Stripe’s tax integration page :

“Charging the legally appropriate amount of tax on orders is especially tricky for online sales. The right percentage to charge–if any–depends upon the customer’s country or US state, the types of products being purchased, and the order total. To help businesses dynamically calculate and apply accurate taxes in real-time, Stripe has partnered with Avalara, TaxJar, and Taxamo.”

First you need to signup in TaxJar.

To use TaxJar using Ruby, install the taxjar-ruby gem using the command :

gem install taxjar-ruby

Sample code for TaxJar integration :

Again, you don’t need the above code for tax integration. This is just to see how the taxjar API is and what all parameters it uses.

There are two kinds of thing that you can sell on stripe :

  1. A physical thing that is shipped.

  2. Subscriptions or SaaS (Software as a service) which can be charged mothly or yearly.

Few points related to tax integration that were no so obvious were :

  1. If you want to make an API call for purchasing a product you need to pass the customer_id generated from the Stripe::Customer.create call as a parameter which make a stripe order create call.

    For Ex :

    By attaching customer_id to this API call you will be able to see the details related to Order and Subscription(created below) both in the Customer details page in stripe.

  2. Tax rate for SaaS products are not governed automatically. You have to make a seperated API call to TaxJar by passing the product_tax_code and get the tax rate percentage for that product. Product tax code for SaaS product is 30070 which you check from taxjar categories API call.

    Then you need to pass that tax_rate as tax_percent while creating a stripe subscription record by calling Stripe::Subscription.create call along with plan id which the user wants to purchase.

    Ex:

I hope these point are helpful in some or the other way. Thanks for reading till the end. :-)