SaileshKumar-customers

[rocky fiber]

Are you using Checkout or Payment Links (I'm assuming you are based on the fact you say you aren't actually creating any customers)

[zinc plaza]

Yes checkout!

For context i never dealt with customers until now, trying to add a referral feature that applies a coupon to the referrers stripe account

but im seeing there are tons of accounts now so I'm worried the coupons will be lost

[rocky fiber]

Gotcha - so a customer really just represents someone who's paying you. If you have repeat customers and you want all their Checkout transactions to be tied to the same Customer you'd use customer (see https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/create#create_checkout_session-customer) to reuse the existing Customer you already have

[zinc plaza]

Got it - so in our use case it might be best to have all users have a stripe customer account to prevent any issues of duplicate accounts?

We just want to make sure we can apply rewards to the correct customers

[rocky fiber]

Using customer with Checkout is one options, but it really depends on your implementing coupons/rewards.

[zinc plaza]

i see, so using customer isn't necessarily the "correct" way to use stripe

more just based on what is needed in the workflow?

[rocky fiber]

A better way to describe it is that as a general concept, a Customer is just someone who is paying you in Stripe but you can add additional logic in your own integration to make it more powerful (like if you want to only have one Stripe customer per email address that's logic you would have to write). As an example, a stripe merchant who may have a subscriptions-based business to access their website may only want to tie a Stripe Customer to an "account" that can access their site

[zinc plaza]

I see ok - thank you. That is helpful!