7 Zaps to Automate Payments with Stripe and Zapier

Collecting payments is one of the most important processes in every business. But, there’s a lot more to a successful transaction than getting your clients to take action.

After all, once they submit their payment details, you still have to process their data. Not to mention taking care of customer service. Thankfully, it’s possible to automate many of those tasks – that’s where Stripe and Zapier automation can help you. 

In this quick guide to Zapier Stripe integration, we’ll look at the benefits of using the two tools together. We’ll also check out some of the workflows that you can create by connecting Stripe with Zapier. So, let’s dive right into it!

Why Choose Stripe? 

Whether you’re selling online services or physical goods, you need a way to process payments. Most importantly, you want a reliable partner to help you process those payments. 

One such partner is Stripe – one of the world’s most popular payment gateways.
The platform lets you accept payments in 135 currencies. It’s also notable for its excellent uptime, security, and integrations. 

Moreover, its fees are usually lower than those of some of its popular competitors. Not to mention its intuitive developers’ platform and extensive documentation. 

If you think about all its great features, it’s no surprise it’s loved by millions of merchants. As of early 2023, it’s ranked as either 4th or 5th (depending on the ranking) most popular payment provider.

Interestingly, Zapier themselves trusts Stripe to process their own payments. In 2021, they estimated that the switch brought a 4% uplift in authorization rates and an extra $3M in revenue. 

All that shows that Stripe is an excellent choice for a payment processing app. And it gets even better if you add Zapier to the mix!

Why Integrate Zapier and Stripe?

On top of all of the aforementioned benefits of using Stripe, one other reason to use it is its excellent integration with Zapier. 

By integrating the two, you can: 

• Easily send customer data to all key apps and databases.

• Start processing your client data the moment they make a purchase.
• Trigger key marketing campaigns across different tools automatically.
• Connect Stripe to tools that don’t yet have a Stripe integration (and vice versa)
• Go beyond what the official Stripe integration has to offer 

It’s worth noting that Stripe boasts numerous native integrations. 

Still, Zapier may still be a better choice, even if Stripe offers a native integration of its own. Here’s why.

Should You Use Zapier Even If There’s a Native Stripe Integration? 

Today, over 400 different tools offer a built-in Stripe integration. In many cases, that integration is limited to collecting payments. 

But, many apps offer Stripe integrations that go beyond payment collection.

For example, a Mailchimp integration lets you share client data from Stripe to Mailchimp automatically. 

However, while it can send customer data, it cannot trigger a plethora of different steps at the same time. Steps that you could benefit from having in your automation workflow. 

And sure, you could combine the two. But, if you’re going to set up a Zap anyway, why not build a Stripe Zapier workflow right from the start? 

Especially that there are a couple of important benefits to doing that: 

• You can go beyond what the official Stripe integration has to offer. This is key to building more effective workflows. It allows you to automate even complicated business processes. Which, in turn, can save you even more time and money. 
• You can connect multiple different apps using one, convenient Zapier dashboard.
• You don’t have to worry that one of the apps in your workflow doesn’t have a Stripe integration. With over 5000 apps that integrate with Zapier, it’s likely you won’t need to integrate any apps of your own. 
• You can create a Single Source of Truth, and send Stripe data right to it. With Zapier, you can then still send that data to other tools in that same workflow. 

Of course, the final choice will depend on the workflow that you’re trying to build. 

But, as you are about to see, the Stripe app inside Zapier has everything you might need to make Stripe a part of even the most advanced Zap.

Stripe Zapier Integration – Available Triggers and Actions

Thanks to Zapier being Stripe’s technology partner, they created a really great app. With over a dozen triggers (most of them are instant triggers), there’s hardly a scenario for which you aren’t ready.

In total, the Stripe Zapier app allows you to trigger a Zap on a:

• Canceled subscription
• Completed checkout session
• Failed payment
• Failed invoice payment
• New customer
• New dispute (when a customer disputes a charge)
• New invoice
• New invoice item
• New payment
• New payment link
• New refund
• Updated subscription

As you can see, the triggers allow you to build all kinds of workflows. You can process new customers, save canceled subscriptions or improve payment collection. We’ll get to workflow examples later in this article – now, let’s take a quick look at actions.

The available actions are split into two categories. The actions in the first category allow you to create prices, links, products, and subscriptions inside Stripe:

The actions in the search category let you look up different values such as payments, customers, or invoices:

In total, you can ask Stripe to perform a dozen different actions – these include:

• Creating a new customer
• Creating a new payment link
• Creating a price
• Creating a product
• Creating a subscription
• Deactivating a payment link
• Updating a customer
• Finding a charge
• Finding a customer
• Finding an invoice
• Finding a payment
• Finding a subscription

Again, these allow you to create or improve a variety of different workflows. Speaking of which – let’s look at a couple of sample Stripe Zaps.

Sample Stripe Zapier Workflows

Considering the number of different triggers and actions, there’s barely a limit to how many Stripe and Zapier workflows you can set up. In this article, we’ll look at 7 short automation workflows, each helping you tackle a different area of payment processing. 

Please note that the majority of the examples are focused only on the foundation of the workflow. 

In many cases, these examples can be heavily expanded or even mixed in one Zap.

Send Customer Data to Your Single Source of Truth

The goal of this workflow is to move customer data from Stripe to your main client database. Sometimes, it’ll be your CRM that will serve as your Single Source of Truth. 

This could be the case if you rely heavily on Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, or similar tools. 

But, if your workflows include multiple tools, it’s worth adding an “intermediary” app that’ll collect client data. 

Then, you can simply send the data to those other tools in the consecutive steps of your automation.

An excellent example of such a tool is Airtable. In this case, an example workflow could look like the one below:

Whenever there’s a new customer in Stripe, we check whether they have already been added to Airtable. We then update the record, making sure that we ask Zapier to create one if it doesn’t exist yet:

Then, we can move that data to any other tool that we want. In our example, we added subscribers to MailerLite.

Of course, the same workflow can also be triggered by other events, such as a New Payment trigger. The key is that you collect and save all customer data for future use. 

Generate Invoices or Receipts in Your Favorite Accounting Tool

You don’t have to restrict yourself to triggering a Zap just on new Stripe customers. After all, you’re going to get more new payments than you’ll get new customers. 

Thankfully, with Zapier, you can easily automate the processing of every Stripe payment. For example, you can set Zapier to create a new Quickbooks receipt or invoice on each new payment:

And you don’t have to stop here! 

With just one more step, you could get Zapier to send the receipt straight to the customer. And, if it’s their first payment, you could add them to the “paying customers segment” in your CRM.

Notify Your Customer Success Team About a New Dispute

The more products you sell, the higher the chance that you’ll inevitably run into a refund request or a dispute. 

Whenever one of these happens, it’s critical that you act fast. 

Thanks to Zapier, you can set Stripe to trigger a workflow that significantly increases the chance of a positive outcome. For example, you can send a Slack message to let your team know about the problem. 

This will give them time to look into the issue. That fast reaction can then help the client change their mind (or it may help promptly solve the error, if it was one).

You can then send a Gmail email to the customer, asking them about the problem:

Of course, a single email is usually not enough to solve the problem. But, it may prompt the client to reply even before your team reaches out. 

This, in turn, shows your professionalism to the client and speeds up the resolution.  

Increase Payment Rate of Failed Invoice Payments

Another issue related to payments is failed invoice payments. Whenever Stripe triggers a Zapier workflow, you can then use it to:

• Tag the client who’s experiencing the problem in your CRM
• Trigger an email sequence that’ll explain to them potential issues and ask them if they need help. This is a great way to show that you genuinely care about your clients and want to help them. 
• Then, depending on your automation setup, you could wait to see if the client solved the problem by themselves. If not, you can get your team involved. 
• If you decide on the latter, you can set the Zap to create and assign a task to the right team member. 
• You can also add a Slack message, prompting the team to look into the issue. 

In general, here’s what a sample workflow could look like:

Naturally, the above is just an example. There are plenty of alternatives to the above. These will depend on the tools that you use and your internal company processes.

Turn a New Subscription into a Long-Term Customer

The next thing you could use Zapier for is to strengthen your relationship with a new customer right from the start of their subscription. 

This is a critical step especially if you’re offering a money-back guarantee. In this case, even a simple workflow as the one below can improve your retention rate:

The key here is step #4. In this step, we tag the person to let Encharge trigger its own automation workflow. We then want to start sending an introduction sequence that will help the audience use the tool. 

If you can help them use the tool to solve their problems, you skyrocket the chance that they’ll become your long-term customers.  

Try and Save Leaving Customers

Let’s not forget that you won’t always be focusing just on new customers. If you’re running a subscription business, you know the feeling of a user canceling their subscription.

The good news is, Zapier can help you try and save some of those who cancel. 

For example, whenever someone cancels their subscription, you can use Zapier to inform the customer success team. You can do so to let them know about the situation or to prompt them to reach out to the person immediately.

If you decide on the former, you can then tag such a customer to add them to a special campaign in your email automation tool:

Other things that you could include in this workflow include:

• Adding a task for the customer success team in the PM tool so they won’t miss it. It also allows you to track their progress.
• Creating a discount coupon or a special offer. For example, you could offer the customer another month for free and delay the next payment. 
• Inviting the customer to a quick call to discuss why they canceled the subscription and see if there’s a way to solve the issues they had with the tool. 

Automatically Create a New Stripe Product

Of course, you can go beyond using Stripe as a trigger. As mentioned earlier, with a dozen different actions, there’s even more you can do with Stripe and Zapier.

A popular use case for Stripe as an action is related to automated product creation. 

For example, you can automatically create a Stripe product whenever you add one in WooCommerce (or a similar platform):

Even though it’s just a two-step Zap, it can save you hours of your time each time you add new products to your website. 

And, don’t forget that WooCommerce is not the only platform that you can integrate with Stripe using Zapier.  

Automate Your Payments with Stripe and Zapier

Now that you know the benefits of integrating Stripe with Zapier, it’s time to take action. 

What’s important is that it doesn’t matter if you copy one of the above workflows, tweak it to adjust it to your needs, or come up with something entirely different. 

Even just one Zap can start saving you and your team a massive amount of time and money.

And, don’t forget that if you have any problems with Zapier, or want someone to do the entire setup for you, I’m here to help. 

Simply schedule a quick discovery call (or shoot me an email). Let’s discuss how you can use Zapier to automate your payment processing.