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Integrating In-house Data and Workflows with Stripe Using Private Stripe Apps

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Stripe Apps is a recently-announced platform that allows developers to embed content within Stripe's web UI, extending its functionality to allow interaction with non-Stripe services.

Your immediate thought upon hearing of such a platform might be that it is useful for public services, such as customer support, to develop Stripe integrations. This is a core use-case and high-profile public integrations like those for Intercom and DocuSign have featured prominently in demonstrations of the platform's capabilities.

However, you shouldn't overlook the value of private apps, developed specifically for your organization and visible only to your employees. Private apps may prove to be even more valuable, because they can specifically address your business' problems, automating domain-specific workflows, and integrate with in-house data and services.

What is a private Stripe App?

Stripe Apps published to the marketplace act like apps you might be familiar with from iOS or Android. They are developed for use by the public, each version of them goes through a strict review by Stripe, and they are published to the Stripe Marketplace where anyone can install them.

Private Stripe Apps, in contrast, are published directly to the Stripe account that owns them. Since they are not going to be visible to users outside of the organization they are developed for, they don't have to go through the app review process, simplifying the development and maintenance process.

Accessing internal services

Since Stripe Apps are browser apps which execute on a user's own machine — as opposed to on Stripe's servers — private Stripe Apps can make use of resources that are only accessible from company-controlled devices. Intranet services and any internal authentication are accessible from your private Stripe App just as they are from any other browser-based internal tooling.

There are only two caveats to accessing HTTP services from Stripe Apps. Both of them are driven by the security model of apps. The first is that services must be served over HTTPS, which is standard for internet-facing services, but might not be the case for private services on an intranet.

The second one is that services must allow all cross-origin requests, since requests from Stripe Apps are made with a null origin, and therefore CORS allowlisting cannot be used to secure services against cross-site request forgery.

If this is a major concern, endpoints specific to your Stripe App can be constructed that are secured through Stripe's request signing mechanism, and which proxy requests to the internal services only for requests signed with the App's secret.

Enriching views with context-based data and workflows

Stripe Apps are displayed on the same screen as Stripe objects like customers or invoices, and can access information about those objects and interact with them. This enables smoother workflows by operators by showing important context all in the same view. For example:

  • Displaying product shipping and returns information on the Invoice Details screen in order to make processing refunds more efficient.
  • Allowing operators to see — and maybe edit — the features that a given subscription plan includes directly in the Product Details screen.
  • Displaying account activity from multiple sources like access and change logs in the Customer Details screen in order to make it easier to resolve support queries.

If anyone in your organization is currently working with multiple open browser tabs to manually collate information or execute workflows that cross service boundaries, a private Stripe App could help automate that process. This will free them up to do more valuable tasks, and reduce the likelihood of errors by making contextual information more reliably available, and eliminating manual steps.

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