#tesseract - Express accounts

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

eager oak
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Hello, your account will be the one to create and manage the express accounts. Typically you wouldn't create prices and products in your systems, the prices and products will live on your platform and you make charges that send money to the connect accounts (you can still specify the express account as the merchant of record if that is relevant).

Finding docs that cover this

mossy dagger
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Oh I see, so if I’m building a platform like Patreon and the creators want to set up tiers, like $20, $40, $60. The flow is: redirect the user to create a stripe account. That redirect link will link their account to to my express account. In my UI I can have them create the tiers, and I can use the API to create products and prices on my express account.

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It’s the session link I give them which will allow a connection between their stripe account and my express account

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It creates a link in the stripe DB so we can transfer funds

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So we don’t even need oauth since the prices and products are on our express account, not theirs

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Am I right? @eager oak

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The only think I need to figure out now is how to group products/prices into tiers for displaying the different options to a subscriber. I.e. if the creator chooses 3 tiers, how do I redirect to a stripe checkout page that has those 3 tiers to select from

eager oak
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Up until that last part on products and prices yes. Here the products and prices wouldn't be linked to one account

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The three tiers is another thing that I can link to in a moment.

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So we have this doc on the three types of payments in Connect. https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges#types . With Express accounts, you will likely want to use "Destination charges" or "Seperate charges and transfers", both of those payments "live" on your platform account so it can be hard to do those with products that live on your connected accounts. I'm about to step out but my colleagues will be able to help talk more to how you may want to structure and store your products and price here

mossy dagger
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Ok thanks!

glass phoenix
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Interesting coincidence as I just asked a very similar question to Stripe support

mossy dagger
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Yes my remaining questions are:
How should I structure the prices/products I store on my account for the creator? We want the 3 tiers, what will that look like? How will I redirect a potential subscriber to these tiers to choose for a particular creator?

spark torrent
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👋 catching up on this thread, as Pompey had to leave

mossy dagger
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Nice to meet you

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@spark torrent those last questions are the only ones left

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I think I understand the rest

spark torrent
mossy dagger
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I need to figure out how to redirect a potential subscriber to the portal where he will see the 3 tiers/prices for the creator he clicked on

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Sounds like I need to configure the portal for each creator, that is, I redirect to a different portal for each connected account I have

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And each of those are configured with the 3 tiers at various prices

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Is that right?

spark torrent
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Yes, your application should present a customer with the different pricing tiers based on the creator/Connected Account in question

mossy dagger
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Ok so we’ll have to create these portals by hand for each connected account, or is there an API to manage that?

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1 portal object in the stripe DB per connected account

spark torrent
mossy dagger
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We are planning to redirect the user to stripe checkout for actually checking out. That site will need to display the 3 pricing options. It sounds like we can do this with the portal, but each creator will have different tiers, so we will need different portals

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We plan to redirect to stripe for checkout

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We will allow the creators to set up tiers in our UI and we will call the APIs to set them up, but for subscribers, we will just redirect them to stripe

spark torrent
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Got it, makes sense. From your application, you can present customers with available creators. Once they choose a creator, your application can present the customer with the available subscription options. These options would pull Products and Prices from the creator's Express account.

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Once a customer is subscribed, you can either use the Stripe's Customer Portal to allow them to manage their subscriptions, or create a subscription management flow from your application.

mossy dagger
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Ok that’s where l’m confused. I was assuming we could redirect the customer to stripe and they will see the 3 options to subscribe there. Pick one, then subscribe and get redirected back to us

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You’re saying we should display the 3 options in our site and then when the user selects 1 of them, redirect to the stripe checkout page for the singular price/product?

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Is there a way to do what I mentioned above? Is it not preferred?

spark torrent
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The Stripe Customer Portal is meant to be used after a customer has subscribed to a plan. Customers can use the Portal to update or cancel their subscription, billing address, payment details.

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Your point is exactly it: your site should present the three options. When the customer selects one of these options, redirect to Checkout for that Product

mossy dagger
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Ok so redirect to checkout for a single product, then we get a link for the subscriber later that we can use to direct them to portal for managing the subscription

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If they have multiple products with us, they will all show up in the portal

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When we create the products in the API, can we group them by connected account, or do products just sit loose?

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And our system/site is what keeps the grouping?

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I.e. if we want to allow upgrades/downgrades between tiers in the portal, across all of the creators you subscribe to

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Does that make sense?

spark torrent
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These Products and Prices should be created within each Connected Account

mossy dagger
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I thought we were creating products and prices on our express account?

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This sounds different

spark torrent
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Ah, sorry, read through the history once more.

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Your system would keep the grouping/mapping between creator and Product + Price

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A Customer could be subscribed to multiple plans with different creators. When creating a Customer Portal session, you specify the Customer ID, so they should have the ability to manage subscriptions across creators from a single Portal session

mossy dagger
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Ok great

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And if we want them to be able to upgrade or downgrade?

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Then stripe needs to know about the relationship

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For ex: go from $20 to $40 for MrBeast

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When we create the products/prices, is that something we would specify then in an API call, and then when the subscriber gets redirected to the portal, he would be able to upgrade/downgrade there?

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I think this is my last question

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And I thank you for answering

spark torrent
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You can set a default Customer Portal configuration in your Dashboard, and use the API to create Portal sessions with a custom configuration if necessary

mossy dagger
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Sounds like we just need to make an API call to add a configuration to the portal whenever a creators adds tiers

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And the singular portal will be able to handle all the upgrades/downgrades for all creators

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Is it the case that one portal can handle all that configuration? If you view it but you’re only subscribed to one creator, you’ll only see the ability to upgrade/downgrade that although the portal is configured to allow upgrades across all creators? It only displays the creator you are subscribed to?

spark torrent
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I think it might be best to test this out in Test mode to see the Customer Portal in action. If recurring plans are all stored in your Platform account, allowing customers to upgrade/downgrade from the Portal will show all available plans to the customer, across creators.

mossy dagger
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Ah but we could pass a custom configuration in the URL saying only show the plans the subscriber has subscribed to

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Yes I’d have to play with it. I’m confused as to what the portal shows when you have products configured in product catalogs

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That’s the last hurdle: how to make sure the portal only displays the plans you are actually subscribed to, and allows you to upgrade/downgrade only those

tawny jewel
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you control which products/prices to show in the Portal Configuration itself

mossy dagger
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Ah, is that when we create the link, or is there a Boolean that says “only show what this customer is subscribed to, not all possible subscriptions”

tawny jewel
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Im really confused

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the portal doesn't show "all subscriptions"

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it just shows the current subscriptions this customer has

mossy dagger
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bingo that's all I needed

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thanks a bunch

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that's all my questions

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it was a long thread, but I really appreciate it

tawny jewel
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happy to help 🙂

mossy dagger
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We'll create our products/prices on our Stripe account using the API from our webapp. When a subscriber wants to subscribe to a Creator, we'll redirect to a Stripe checkout session for that singular tier/product/price. When subscribed, we'll show a link to manage your subscriptions at stripe, which will open up a portal session and allow the subscriber to cancel active subscriptions.,

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we'll use the direct links to customer accounts, no need for Oauth