3 ms·

I'm sorry, but I don't grok the utility of this. Can someone "explain this like I am five"? We are a fairly long-running Stripe customer, and we mirror all tra

I'm sorry, but I don't grok the utility of this. Can someone "explain this like I am five"? We are a fairly long-running Stripe customer, and we mirror all transaction data, with the exception of actual card info, into our internal dbms. I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this as well, considering how easy API integration is. So what is the utility of this service versus querying internal data - particularly when one can join on data sets that Stripe has no access to?

scrollaway 9y ago
> I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this as well A lot of customers don't in fact do that. I've been working a bunch on dj-stripe (https://github.com/kavdev/dj-stripe https://github.com/kavdev/dj-stripe) and trying to make it work exactly like that, but before that at the very least it's pretty safe to assume that most Django apps using Stripe only had a fraction of the data you can pull from Stripe. It's also only a model you really need for subscriptions. For one-off charges, all you need is a copy of whatever data you care about in the charge and invoice models.
- Sheepzez 9y ago
  Thanks for being one of the people working on dj-stripe! I've been following its dev for months, and slowly building it in to a site I'm building, so I'm thankful to the people working on improving it!
wpnx 9y ago
Your internal data might not be consistent with what is stored in Stripe. Since Stripe is the one processing the payments, it is ultimately the source of truth for all data regarding whether or not transactions went through, failure reasons, disputes... etc. The act of reconciling the list of transactions you have stored in your database with what the source of truth has is an important process for finance teams.
- daxorid 9y ago
  edit: Downvoted for asking a legitimate question about Stripe's data handling protocols. I'll ask Stripe directly. Sorry.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    There's plenty of stuff that changes out-of-band, such as subscriptions/invoices, retried charges, etc. You're supposed to use the Webhook system for this, but not everyone bothers.
colmmacc 9y ago
A friend of mine is director of business for https://www.franschocolates.com/ https://www.franschocolates.com/ , which is a great local Seattle family business that has grown up to be big thanks to a great product (Seriously good chocolate!). They moved to Stripe for payments years ago, and it's helped them out a lot with simpler integration and more data. Sigma looks great for them. They're not a big outfit, they don't have a dedicated engineering3 dept or developers on staff. Their main business is making chocolate after all. With Sigma they can more easily query their transaction data and get all sorts of insight. My friend has degrees in Chemical Engineering and Nutrition, she's a smart woman and can do a lot more with excel that I can muster. Although she learned some coding in engineering school, using the APIs directly is a lot to ask. SQL is much more accessible, and was originally developed for business professionals just like her. So I expect something like this will help her go from periodic data imports and excel-based analysis to much more frequent, maybe daily, reports and analysis.
- genericpseudo 9y ago
  Running a data warehouse is a full-time commitment. Tons of real businesses have no software engineers. This is a great-looking product.
  - fraserharris 9y ago
    With modern data warehouses like BigQuery & Snowflake, this is no longer true. We at Fivetran get people setup with a BI tool, warehouse and data pipelines in a day. From there, its all SQL with little to no management of the underlying system. Note: I'm specifically excluding Redshift which requires active management
icelancer 9y ago
> I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this as well Err... we push seven figures a year through Stripe, and we don't do this.
rtpg 9y ago
Well if you had this, you could probably get along with this just this more often. Kinda like you can "just" use the dashboard for most businesses rather than doing a bunch of API stuff. Though the point about data sets is important: even if we have the metadata here, ultimately it's only a partial view into money we're receiving. But if Stripe is your only payment process, this is definitely interesting.
Cakez0r 9y ago
> I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this I think you answered your own question!

scrollaway 9y ago

> I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this as well A lot of customers don't in fact do that. I've been working a bunch on dj-stripe (https://github.com/kavdev/dj-stripe https://github.com/kavdev/dj-stripe) and trying to make it work exactly like that, but before that at the very least it's pretty safe to assume that most Django apps using Stripe only had a fraction of the data you can pull from Stripe. It's also only a model you really need for subscriptions. For one-off charges, all you need is a copy of whatever data you care about in the charge and invoice models.

Sheepzez 9y ago
Thanks for being one of the people working on dj-stripe! I've been following its dev for months, and slowly building it in to a site I'm building, so I'm thankful to the people working on improving it!

wpnx 9y ago

Your internal data might not be consistent with what is stored in Stripe. Since Stripe is the one processing the payments, it is ultimately the source of truth for all data regarding whether or not transactions went through, failure reasons, disputes... etc. The act of reconciling the list of transactions you have stored in your database with what the source of truth has is an important process for finance teams.

daxorid 9y ago
edit: Downvoted for asking a legitimate question about Stripe's data handling protocols. I'll ask Stripe directly. Sorry.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  There's plenty of stuff that changes out-of-band, such as subscriptions/invoices, retried charges, etc. You're supposed to use the Webhook system for this, but not everyone bothers.

colmmacc 9y ago

A friend of mine is director of business for https://www.franschocolates.com/ https://www.franschocolates.com/ , which is a great local Seattle family business that has grown up to be big thanks to a great product (Seriously good chocolate!). They moved to Stripe for payments years ago, and it's helped them out a lot with simpler integration and more data. Sigma looks great for them. They're not a big outfit, they don't have a dedicated engineering3 dept or developers on staff. Their main business is making chocolate after all. With Sigma they can more easily query their transaction data and get all sorts of insight. My friend has degrees in Chemical Engineering and Nutrition, she's a smart woman and can do a lot more with excel that I can muster. Although she learned some coding in engineering school, using the APIs directly is a lot to ask. SQL is much more accessible, and was originally developed for business professionals just like her. So I expect something like this will help her go from periodic data imports and excel-based analysis to much more frequent, maybe daily, reports and analysis.

genericpseudo 9y ago
Running a data warehouse is a full-time commitment. Tons of real businesses have no software engineers. This is a great-looking product.
- fraserharris 9y ago
  With modern data warehouses like BigQuery & Snowflake, this is no longer true. We at Fivetran get people setup with a BI tool, warehouse and data pipelines in a day. From there, its all SQL with little to no management of the underlying system. Note: I'm specifically excluding Redshift which requires active management

icelancer 9y ago

> I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this as well Err... we push seven figures a year through Stripe, and we don't do this.

rtpg 9y ago

Well if you had this, you could probably get along with this just this more often. Kinda like you can "just" use the dashboard for most businesses rather than doing a bunch of API stuff. Though the point about data sets is important: even if we have the metadata here, ultimately it's only a partial view into money we're receiving. But if Stripe is your only payment process, this is definitely interesting.

Cakez0r 9y ago

> I am presuming nearly all Stripe customers do this I think you answered your own question!