8 Powerful Ways to Automate Stripe Payments With Zapier
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When you’re running a business, you have to find ways to reduce your workload without sacrificing productivity. That’s why you should always be looking for ways to automate your tools to work together.
But not every tool integrates with every other tool. How do you automate your tasks without waiting for developers to build integrations for your favorite tools or spending thousands of dollars on custom code?
With Zapier! In their words, “Zapier lets you easily connect the web apps you use, making it easy to automate tedious tasks.” You can simply recruit Zapier to handle the work for you. As of this post, Zapier has over 1,500 connected apps and they create more every day.
In this article, we’re going to help you get started with Zapier and show you some powerful automation that works with our favorite payment processor: Stripe.
Get Started With Stripe and Zapier
Before we dive in, we assume you’re already using Stripe to accept payments on your site. If not, we highly recommend using WP Simple Pay, the EASIEST WordPress Stripe plugin.
WP Simple Pay makes it easy to create Stripe payment forms and accept payments from your customers, all within your WordPress dashboard.
For more details, check out how to accept Stripe payments from your site.
To get started with Stripe + Zapier integrations, you’ll need to create a free Zapier account. Sign up on their homepage.
Zapier automation – called “zaps” – use two elements to automate a process.
- Trigger – This is the signal that starts automation. It tells the automation, “Hey, time to get started!” (E.g. when a new sale appears in Stripe.)
- Action – This is whatever you want to happen based on the trigger. (E.g. send an email, create a report, or post data somewhere else.)
With the right combinations of triggers and actions, you can create sophisticated automations that take care of a lot of your tedious work. There’s no reason to spend your time copying and pasting data, manually notifying people, or repeatedly checking your apps and tools. Let software handle that for you.
You can create your own zaps on your Zapier dashboard. Enter “Stripe” in the first box to create a zap that uses a Stripe event as a trigger. Type the name of another tool in the second box to integrate it with Stripe.
When you take a payment with WP Simple Pay, all of that data transfers to Stripe. While WP Simple Pay doesn’t integrate directly with Zapier, there are countless zaps that connect Stripe to just about anything you could need. The data flow looks like this:
WP Simple Pay > Stripe > Everything Else
So how do you get the most out of that Stripe data? You have a lot of control here. Zapier offers hundreds of Stripe integrations. To give you some inspiration, here’s a list of our favorite zaps that help businesses of any size.
Zap #1. Add New Stripe Sales as Rows on Google Sheets
This is the perfect zap for people who like to keep their books in order. This automation will trigger with every new sale in Stripe. It will create a new row on a Google Sheet with all the accounting data you need. Once your data is organized nicely in a Google Sheet, you can literally send it to any other tool you like with another simple zap.
Zap #2. Add Stripe Customers to a MailChimp List
Like most businesses, you probably want to communicate with your customers after they make a purchase. It’s smart to move their email address to your email marketing tool so you can serve them content over time and create repeat sales.
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools because it’s easy to use and free for small email lists. A lot of businesses start with MailChimp. This integration will automatically add each new customer to your MailChimp list.
For some more detailed information on adding customers to your mailing list, check out this article: How to Add New Stripe Customers to your Mailing List without Code.
Zap #3. Create a Trello Card for New Stripe Charges
If a new sale means you or your team have to kick into action, you’ll want to stay organized by using a project management tool like Trello. With this integration, Zapier will create a new Trello card whenever a new sale appears. You can populate the Trello card with any information you like so you and your team have everything you need to help the customer.
Zap #4. Get Slack Notifications for New Stripe Sales
Keeping your team notified is critical, especially if you have a lot of sales coming through. It helps to add a notification to wherever you spend most of your time so you can act right away.
For most of us, that means Slack. Slack is an extremely popular tool for teams of all sizes. This integration will notify you in Slack whenever a new sale comes through Stripe. You can use the notification as a jumping-off point to give directions to your team or engage with your new customer.
Zap #5. Push Stripe Data to Cyfe Dashboard
Putting your data in one place is a key way to keep an eye on your business. Cyfe is a highly customizable dashboard for all of your metrics. It takes a little work to set up, but once you do you will have all of your information in one place in an easy to digest format.
For instance, you might set up a trigger that adds new charges to a Cyfe widget that totals your monthly revenue. You could set it up to subtract refunds from the widget as well so your total is always accurate. There’s a lot you can do if you play around with it.
Zap #6 Send Gmail Emails for Stripe Events
Email may feel a little archaic, but it’s still the most popular way people communicate online. In fact, many of us spend more than five hours each week checking our email. So it’s an effective way to reach your customers, team, and partners.
With this zap, you can create an email based on any Stripe event. You might send yourself an email whenever a customer pays. You might notify your team whenever a new invoice is created. Or you might send automated emails to customers whenever you refund an order, add them to a new plan, or apply a coupon. There are countless possibilities for automation with this zap!
Zap #7: Create an Airtable Database with All of Your Stripe Customers
Do you like sorting through your data to learn as much as you can about your customers and your business? If so, we strongly recommend Airtable. Airtable is a database tool that makes it easy to manipulate your data to help you glean insights that help you improve your business. This zap will transfer your data from Stripe to Airtable.
Zap #8: Add/Manipulate Customer Data in Zoho CRM
You don’t need many customers before you start to have trouble keeping them organized. It’s easy to neglect to send an email, forget to follow up on a project, or lose track of your invoices. It’s smart to use a CRM (customer relationship management tool) to keep things straight.
Zoho is one of the most popular CRMs because it’s part of Zoho’s massive suite of online business tools. By importing your customer data to Zoho, you gain one-click access to lots of other solutions as well. Use Zapier to move your customer and payment data to Zoho so you can keep track of your customers.
Get Creative!
This list certainly isn’t exhaustive. These zaps are just suggestions to help you automate some of the most common tasks that online businesses deal with. There are countless ways to integrate Stripe (and thus WP Simple Pay) with nearly any software tool.
And if you don’t find a direct integration between Stripe and your favorite tool, you can usually make the connection using two zaps with Google Sheets as an intermediary (Stripe > Google Sheets > whatever you need).
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