Turn your Stripe account into an online business

I like things very.. simple. I was running my software development business using Stripe as the payment processing system. Stripe was handling my online payments including customer subscriptions and custom service fees. In this article, I’ll explain how I turned my Stripe account to an online business using our open-source solution, in under 3 minutes! Don’t believe me? I have proof!

Subscription-based online business

If you own a business, gig, or a side hustle that is providing clients with some sort of service, then you probably have recurring customers. You could be a blogger who provides monthly blogging services, a photographer who is providing portrait services, or a technology business who sells monthly servers, domains, or any other type of subscription-based service.

Stripe has already made things a lot simpler. You can easily create payment plans and subscribe customers to them in Stripe. Stripe’s subscription system automatically charges the customer at the end of each billing cycle. It also allows additional fees to each subscription, change price, refund, or even give account credit to the customer at any time during the subscription’s lifetime.

If you want to allow your customers to view payment plans, subscribe themselves to plans, approve additional charges, and view invoices, without your handholding, you’d need an online website that integrates with Stripe. A website that automates your subscription-based online business. Automation can get very expensive for businesses!

Dreadful solutions

There are some existing solutions.. dreadful ones. You could create a new Wordpress website, install WooCommerce plugin, attach your Stripe account to it, and then end up paying a software company thousands of dollars to customize the website so it flawlessly manages your subscriptions and meets your use-cases. Not to mention, you’d also have to hire a designer to make the online shop look presentable. Let’s just say, scaling becomes extremely hard and most likely will force you to change tools completely. It’s a cheap dirty solution.

Or, you could of course pay a third-party company, like Chargify, a percentage of your revenue to get partial functionality. Pay more, get less, and regret giving a part of your revenue away. This option gets worse as you grow and want to cut your overhead costs.

I haven’t forgotten about a custom website solution. If you have already fell into this rabbit hole, no explanation is needed. If not, then my advice is not trying to reinvent the wheel and build your own custom solution. You’ll end up spending more time building and worrying about your online website rather than the main business.

The Solution

ServiceBot is a platform that ties to your Stripe account and imports all of your existing Stripe customers, payment plans, subscriptions, and invoices. It will also invite all of your customers to login to a self-service portal to manage their existing subscriptions. You can set it up just in under 3 minutes… That is powerful!

Assuming that you already have a Stripe account, the procedure is simple. Three easy steps:

1- Create your ServiceBot website

Step one, go to https://servicebot.io, enter your email address, choose a password, and type your business name. Submit. Wait about 15 seconds, and you will be redirected to your new ServiceBot website.

https://servicebot.io — Giving out limit open-beta free instances. September 2017

2- Apply your Stripe API keys

Step two, get your Stripe API keys and paste them into your ServiceBot website setup page.

ServiceBot initial setup page. ServiceBot requires you to have an Stripe account.

3- Import your Stripe account

Step three, login with your email and password, click on Manage System > Stripe settings. Press ‘import’ and all your Stripe account information will be imported to your new online website. You can also choose to notify your customers to login to their new ServiceBot accounts and manage their subscriptions!

ServiceBot Stripe Import System.

Video Demonstration

I also made a video to show you how fast and easy this process really is!

How to turn your Stripe account into a full subscription-based online business

Conclusion

ServiceBot is only an eight month old project. It is still running as beta. We are providing everyone with free open-beta ServiceBot websites to gather feedback and improve the software prior to launching ServiceBot 1.0. You can get yours from https://servicebot.io.

Currently we are focusing on our plugin and integration system, and our new NodeJS framework.

Don’t forget to checkout our open-source repository. If you have any questions feel free to contact me directly.