Eclectic Nature

[ornate elbow]

The answer is generally 'it depends'. How are you integrating with Checkout? Via the API? Or are you using something like Payment Links?

[stable gust]

Payment links and pricing tables

[ornate elbow]

Then yes, in most cases those surfaces will default to creating a new Customer for each payment. And you're right in that we don't deduplicate email addresses

[stable gust]

Firebase, when creating a new user, also creates a Stripe customer. So the customerID from Stripe is saved into Firestore. But when the user logs in, and then attempts a payment, even though the email of the user exists and the customer ID exists, Stripe creates a new customerID for the payment and it's not added to the original user account

actually, when the new Stripe customer is created, it is using the same email address. I can test it 10 times and each payment made will have a new account with the same email

[ornate elbow]

But when the user logs in, and then attempts a payment, even though the email of the user exists and the customer ID exists, Stripe creates a new customerID for the payment and it's not added to the original user account
There's currently no way to re-use existing Customer objects/IDs with Payment Links and pricing table. Only direct Checkout Sessions

[ornate elbow]

Yup, that's expected. As I said, we don't chekc for email uniqueness or deduplicate

[stable gust]

ok, so I have to code it all manually.. cannot use payment links or pricing tables, corrrect?

so let me ask you one more question: If I were to leave this as is, what is the downside with respect to Stripe if there are multiple customers with the same email?

[ornate elbow]

You can't use PL/PT if you want to re-use an existing cus_xxx

[ornate elbow]

Nothing really, but obviously it's problematic for you to prevent trial abuse etc

[stable gust]

I was thinking if there's no downside to having multiple customers in Stripe with the same email, then I can leave it as is and just use the webhook to capture the info I need and bring that into my firestore

[ornate elbow]

Right, but the idea is for you to map cus_xxx in Stripe to your database/auth service so you can provision access according to their subscription status

If there's multiple Customer objects in Stripe that in theory map to one user in your system, then that becomes an issue for you to manage

[stable gust]

right, but after each transaction I can save the newly created Stripe customer ID for that payment and save that to my database so that I can track the most recent payment

Thanks for your time and help!
I will build it manually instead of using the pre-built checkouts... It would be messy 🙂

have a good day!