Stripe Checkout

TL;DR: The changes do not benefit us or our customers, caught us by surprise, and created customer support issues almost immediately. As a direct result, we are now working on moving to a stripe.js form where Stripe’s branding will be hidden as much as possible and we retain full control of our user experience.

I do want to start with my usual caveat that while I’m discussing negatives here in the hope of promoting improvements, we’re generally positive about Stripe, and I’ve waxed lyrical about checkout.js specifically in the past. This appears to have been a blip and hasn’t particularly shaken our general confidence as Stripe customers.

I should also acknowledge that I did promise to send the information below to one of Stripe’s people who replied to my e-mail several weeks ago, and I haven’t; mea culpa. I might as well put it here for general discussion at this point.

So, we’re planning to dump Checkout for a few reasons, but first among them is that Stripe changed our users’ experience for the worse, without our knowledge or consent. That simply shouldn’t happen. I appreciate the desire to incrementally improve things, but not everyone will share the same views on what is an improvement, so pushing changes to our user experience in an uncontrolled way is not really acceptable to us.

For example, our customers typically sign up once for a subscription and then never enter their card details again, so the remember-me changes do absolutely nothing positive for them or us. On the other hand, almost the first customer we had sign up after the changes went live then contacted us to say he’d put in an incorrect phone number and could we please change it to a different one he mailed to us. Our first reaction was that we didn’t collect phone numbers. This is how we discovered Checkout had been changed. Then we looked on the Stripe dashboard to see how to update the information, and it’s not there, so all I can do is mail the Stripe support team to ask for help (and, to be fair, they did, very quickly). So now I’ve gone from having a reasonably streamlined sign-up process to having a paying customer who is distressed because they’ve made a mistake and I can’t even fix it for them. Epic fail.

We had similar reactions to the prompt for an e-mail address, when we had chance to watch some users signing up in person a few weeks ago (not watching them actually enter their card details, of course). They’d just entered their name, postal address and e-mail address on our create-account form, clicked through to pay by card, and now the next thing they get is a prompt for much the same details again! I think every person who signed up that day challenged something at this stage in the process, several being suspicious of spam.

Perhaps the most surprising thing to me, as someone who’s seen overwhelmingly positive views of Stripe on forums like HN, is that the Stripe brand was a clear negative in the sign-up process. In the UK, Stripe is not a well-known organisation in the way that say a high street bank is, and we appear to be losing some level of business immediately because of the branding. For example, someone mailed us essentially asking why we’d let this Stripe organisation hijack our site. There was clearly some general uncertainty from that particular user — they also thought the Stripe form was not secure, because on their iPad it popped up in a separate tab and they didn’t see the padlock icon in the usual place — but uncertainty is to be expected from non-technical customers.

I wanted to send them links to authoritative sources to prove that Stripe was legitimate, but this proved surprisingly difficult. Googling any likely variation of “Stripe PCI” or “Stripe security” turned up more negative links than positive ones on the first SERP (justified, correct, or otherwise, there they were). When I searched for “Stripe hack” I found numerous links to a site called Hacker News, which of course is no surprise to us but more so for our non-geek customers. When I went to look up Stripe’s entry in the Visa Global Registry, as linked from their own site (https://stripe.com/gb/help/faq#pci-compliance), it only showed them as operating in the US and Canada, but both we and our customer were in the UK.

So the bottom line is that we’re going to move away from both Stripe-controlled UX (where the changes have been a clear negative in our case) and the Stripe branding that comes with Checkout. It’s a shame, because the idea is still a great one and obviously it’s more work for us to redo the integration, but when 100% of the customers you’re watching sign up don’t like something about your sign-up process...

> So, we’re planning to dump Checkout for a few reasons, but first among them is that Stripe changed our users’ experience for the worse, without our knowledge or consent.

When we first launched Checkout, we tried to emphasize that this was a canvas for Stripe to test out improvements. The last paragraph of the launch blog post[1] was:

"Ultimately, we think the structural shift is most important. Normally, you build a payment form and move on. Maybe you eventually get time to revisit it a year later. By integrating Stripe’s payment form, your checkout is continually improving. As we refine and iterate over time, we’ll be able to immediately pass enhancements on to anyone who uses it. We’re looking forward to seeing what you build, and to doing our part to help improve commerce on the web."

Still, I apologize that it was surprising -- and, especially, that it caused any issues for your customers. I think we likely made a mistake not emphasizing this even more than we have. Checkout is very much an ongoing work.

> For example, our customers typically sign up once for a subscription and then never enter their card details again, so the remember-me changes do absolutely nothing positive for them or us.

Well, the goal isn't just to store card details for your customers -- the idea is also that people don't have to type details on your site if they've already typed them on some other site.

Your points on the flow are well-taken (we now enable you to pre-fill email addresses nicely), and you're right that we should probably create a customer-facing "Why you should trust Stripe" page.

While Stripe.js will always be a first-class citizen on Stripe, and you're obviously very welcome to use it, my sense after reading your comment is that most of your issues are likely solvable. If you've any interest in talking more, I'm patrick@stripe.com.

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-checkout

but seriously, have at it. Guaranteed there's prior art.