Stripe Rolls Out Customer Billing Portal, New Recurring Payment Options

The coronavirus pandemic and its boost to online commerce has provided a major lift to Stripe, the San Francisco-based startup whose software provides the backbone for eCommerce networks around the world.

Now Stripe, whose platform enables companies around the world to accept payments, is rolling out a pair of new products and changes aimed at helping customers manage subscriptions and increase their ability to pay with international bank debits, the company said in a press release.

It is part of a larger bid to capitalize on this big shift, “as the coronavirus pandemic compresses several years of offline-to-online migration into several months,” Stripe noted in its product rollout announcement.

Leading things off, Stripe on Monday (June 29) announced it is launching a “customer portal” feature for Stripe Billing, which currently works with over 100,000 platforms that rely on recurring billing and revenue.

The new feature enables a range of platforms, from eCommerce to restaurants and grocery delivery services, to give their customers the ability to better manage their subscriptions. The feature enables “customers to manage their subscription and billing details, such as updating payment information, choosing from different payment plans,or viewing their entire billing history,” Stripe noted.

“Using Stripe’s pre-built solution was a no-brainer,” said Ben Orenstein, CEO of Tuple, a programming app that helps developers collaborate, in a press release. “This isn’t our core competency, so it would have been distracting for us to scope and build this ourselves.”

And in a second major move, Stripe said it is moving to enable platforms with recurring revenue streams to accept the following payment forms: “Bacs Direct Debit in the U.K., BECS Direct Debit in Australia, FPX bank debits in Malaysia and pre-authorized debits (PADs) in Canada.”

Until now, it has been difficult for platforms to accept these bank debit payment methods due to their “strict design and compliance requirements,” Stripe noted.

In addition to the product rollouts, Stripe also said it has gained a number of prominent new customers for Stripe Billing, a lineup that includes “ChowNow, CloudKitchens, Figma, Masterclass, Notion, Slack and Smartsheet.”

“Stripe allows us to scale our payments system effortlessly,” said Davy Mao, an engineer at Figma, in a press release. “We’ve found that their out-of-the-box features like invoice PDFs, Smart Retries and subscriptions save us time and engineering resources, enabling us to focus on billing features that are more specific to Figma.”