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Stripe Sigma

stripe.com

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Re: Stripe Sigma

#41

Post by scrollaway »

daxorid wrote: post #32

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 - particular…

> 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) 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.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#42

Post by scrollaway »

adamballai wrote: post #20
ram_rar wrote: post #12

Pardon my ignorance! Coming from background of building data pipelines. It seems to me like SQL on backend data. The UI is uber cool. What makes it different from any rdbms system with UI? am I missing something ?

Great question. Sigma is more than an rdbms, relational database. Sigma is an application where you can save and share reports with your team without the need to setup a dedicated ETL pipeline and engineering teams. We curate the quality of the data for you so you don't have to yourself. Hope that helps!

> We curate the quality of the data for you so you don't have to yourself

Can you be more specific?

Re: Stripe Sigma

#43

Post by wpnx »

daxorid wrote: post #32

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 - particular…

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.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#44

Post by [deleted] »

exclusiv wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever learns about the perils of building on someone else's platform. See: twitter 3rd party devs, Buffer, Facebook app devs, etc Stripe isn't a payment processor; they are your financial back office as a platform.

Time to pivot haha! The competitors could give away their service for free and then setup an ad platform to target Stripe users. That lead gen might even make them more money. And since they have the financial data, they could proactively recommend the most cost-effective service to switch to. Kind of like a Credit Karma model.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Sigma

#45

Post by a13n »

notliketherest wrote: post #39

Stripe owns Hackernews. They consistently get their new product offerings to the front page with huge points. Yes they're loved by the Hackernews community (and rightly so) but I wonder if their ability to get their stuff to the front is less to do with it's relevance and more to do with their army of hackernews accounts with tons of karma. Just a thought.

It is a YC company. I don't think they're cheating, I just think stripe is especially interesting to the IN community.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#46

Post by scrollaway »

adamballai wrote: post #9
packetized wrote: post #6

Perhaps a dumb question, but it's not completely obvious from the demo - is there an API for this?

Not a dumb question at all! We do not currently have an API for Sigma. Although, its a great idea and good feedback for the Sigma team. Hope you find good use of its current incarnation. Thanks!

That's.. disappointing to hear, and actually getting me less excited about Sigma than I was. Please do make the API available.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#47

Post by sovande »

exhilaration wrote: post #24
sovande wrote: post #17

Oh shiny, but does it blend? I mean, Stripe has a great API, great design and this, but is Stripe a good payment solution? No, it is not, especially for sellers. Fraud and charge backs are worse than with PayPal. Despite its many shortcomings, PayPal has at least a much better fraud protection system. This is what matters or should matter when choosing a payment solution. Shiny stuff is great, but if the engine is ma…

Stripe provides fraud protection? I thought they were just a (really awesome, developer-friendly) payment processor and you'd need to put something like Kount in front of them to do your own fraud protection.

Radar, smack there in the left-menu, is Stripe's Fraud "prevention" system. You can register and mark fraudulent purchases to improve the machine learning system behind Radar (sure). You can setup rules such as "Block if CVC verification fails" (really and can be disabled). At least, Stripe is trying to address the problem. Unfortunately, not with great success at the moment, but I'm sure/hope it will improve. We use both PayPal and Stripe and the difference is like a green meadow compared to a green toxic waste dump with regards to charge backs and fraud.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#48

Post by colmmacc »

daxorid wrote: post #32

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 - particular…

A friend of mine is director of business for 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.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#49

Post by daxorid »

wpnx wrote: post #43
daxorid wrote: post #32

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 - particular…

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.

edit: Downvoted for asking a legitimate question about Stripe's data handling protocols. I'll ask Stripe directly. Sorry.

Re: Stripe Sigma

#50

Post by benrahn »

sovande wrote: post #17

Oh shiny, but does it blend? I mean, Stripe has a great API, great design and this, but is Stripe a good payment solution? No, it is not, especially for sellers. Fraud and charge backs are worse than with PayPal. Despite its many shortcomings, PayPal has at least a much better fraud protection system. This is what matters or should matter when choosing a payment solution. Shiny stuff is great, but if the engine is ma…

Hi -- I work on the fraud team at Stripe. Last October we introduced Stripe Radar ( https://stripe.com/radar ) a suite of integrated tools to help you beat fraud. While different businesses see different patterns of fraud, we believe that overall our fraud prevention is now as good or better than essentially every other product in the industry. This partly follows from Stripe’s scale: whenever a card is used, there’s now an 80+% chance that we’ve seen it before. We use this data from the global Stripe network to detect and prevent fraud with ML models that we’re constantly updating and refining.

We’d love to hear what would make us work better for you. My email is brahn at stripe.com.

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