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A lot of the time there’s trade-offs that can be made that engineers don’t even consider because they’re not pure. For example, why do you need a one-to-one rel

A lot of the time there’s trade-offs that can be made that engineers don’t even consider because they’re not pure. For example, why do you need a one-to-one relationship between your customers and Stripe customers? I am guilty of it myself, where an 80% solution is unacceptable from an engineering perspective but, actually, when balanced against the cost of building out a perfect solution, the business may well find it very acceptable. One of the most important things I’ve learned about working with third-party systems is that there has to be some amount of surrender to their way of doing things. Essentially, the price of using Stripe is not being able to use invoices as a quote, and that has to be articulated to the business. If that’s not acceptable, then the business should be considering the requirements in aggregate when evaluating a solution, rather than deciding on Stripe and then gradually re-implementing parts of Stripe internally because they aren’t right for the business. (Obviously that’s easier said than done, and for engineers it’s a fun challenge to make something impossible possible, but it’s almost always a mistake and as engineers it’s our responsibility to articulate the burden of owning workarounds.)

gen220 4y ago
The example you give is a smart one that we did explore! Effectively, relationship is no longer user -> stripe customer, but user -> shipping_address -> stripe customer. We decided the cost of implementing and maintaining this solution wasn't worth the benefit to the business. A credit to your later points. We came up with a solution that allows us to ship one-off things to arbitrary addresses with correct tax calculation, and if a customer really wanted to setup a subscription to a distinct address, we could implement it in the future, hackily, with this primitive.
dqv 4y ago
>One of the most important things I’ve learned about working with third-party systems is that there has to be some amount of surrender to their way of doing things. Essentially, the price of using Stripe is not being able to use invoices as a quote, and that has to be articulated to the business. We have this same limitation on another payment platform. We just change the concept on our end to "payers" and allow an account to have multiple payers. When the user adds a payment method, they can either select that existing payer or, if they need to change the name or address, they create a new one. The provider we use had an invoicing product, but it has several misfeatures that just make the product unworkable. We absolutely have to be able to enforce first-in-first-out invoice payments. Users will pay the May invoice before the April invoice and pretend like they are all paid up. I'm not sure why they didn't consider this with a subscription-invoice product... users paying the invoices out of order was a big problem because users saw it as an exploitable vulnerability they could use to get a free month here and there.

gen220 4y ago

The example you give is a smart one that we did explore! Effectively, relationship is no longer user -> stripe customer, but user -> shipping_address -> stripe customer. We decided the cost of implementing and maintaining this solution wasn't worth the benefit to the business. A credit to your later points. We came up with a solution that allows us to ship one-off things to arbitrary addresses with correct tax calculation, and if a customer really wanted to setup a subscription to a distinct address, we could implement it in the future, hackily, with this primitive.

dqv 4y ago

>One of the most important things I’ve learned about working with third-party systems is that there has to be some amount of surrender to their way of doing things. Essentially, the price of using Stripe is not being able to use invoices as a quote, and that has to be articulated to the business. We have this same limitation on another payment platform. We just change the concept on our end to "payers" and allow an account to have multiple payers. When the user adds a payment method, they can either select that existing payer or, if they need to change the name or address, they create a new one. The provider we use had an invoicing product, but it has several misfeatures that just make the product unworkable. We absolutely have to be able to enforce first-in-first-out invoice payments. Users will pay the May invoice before the April invoice and pretend like they are all paid up. I'm not sure why they didn't consider this with a subscription-invoice product... users paying the invoices out of order was a big problem because users saw it as an exploitable vulnerability they could use to get a free month here and there.