Stripe’s new apps marketplace brings third-party tools directly into Stripe

Payments processing and financial infrastructure giant Stripe has launched a new apps marketplace, designed to bring third-party accounting, analytics, CRM, marketing and esignature features directly into Stripe.

While Stripe has offered extensions for several years already, this only allowed businesses to transfer Stripe features and data into other products. Its latest offering works in reverse — it creates new possibilities for developers to build additional functionality directly in the Stripe Dashboard and addresses one of the “top requests” that Stripe said that it receives from customers.

Extensibility

While Stripe has emerged as a $95 billion juggernaut in the payments processing space, companies still need to use a suite of tools with Stripe as part of their day-to-day operations. For example, to issue refund notices, or manage customer support tickets. However, constant “context switching” — that is, opening and closing multiple different apps — can cause confusion, errors and slow everything right down.

At launch, the new Stripe Apps Marketplace will include more than 50 apps from companies such as Xero, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Ramp, DocuSign and Intercom, unifying many of the key tools that companies need to use as part of their payments and finance workflows.

By connecting the Mailchimp app, for example, a company can now automatically send a targeted message whenever a customer completes a purchase. Or with the Intercom app, customer service teams can view entire support and chat histories and respond to specific issues directly from the Stripe interface.

“With the Intercom app integrated into Stripe, our customers can investigate issues, answer payment queries, approve refunds and more from the Stripe Dashboard,” Intercom cofounder and chief strategy officer Des Traynor said in a statement.

It’s worth noting that the new Stripe Apps Marketplace enables developers to build both public-facing apps (i.e., apps that can be used by any Stripe user) and private apps for their own use-cases. This could be useful for displaying data from internal CRM or ERP systems within Stripe.

While Stripe is opening its apps marketplace today, app installations won’t be available for another few weeks. In the coming months and years, the company plans to expand the marketplace to include apps in languages other than English.