Remember your very first sale? When your business was just getting started, that first notification from Stripe probably felt like it had an angelic chorus in the background. But then, another notification rolled in. And then another. Soon, as your business took off, it got harder and harder to stay on top of all those sale alerts—and that’s not to mention the headache of dealing with refund requests and failed payments.
It’s easy to feel like you have too much of a good thing—but the solution isn’t to go back to the simpler days of fewer sales. You just need to connect Stripe to the rest of your tech stack so you can automate some of the financial busywork. With a few Zaps (our word for our automated workflows), Stripe automation lets you reduce sales headaches like tracking invoices and updating your email list while still scaling your business.
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To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.
Connect Stripe to a spreadsheet or database
A spreadsheet is more than just a list of rows and columns for raw data. Think of it as a data processor. It can tabulate payment fees, sort customers by largest purchases, and calculate your highest-selling products by category. It’s an automation engine in and of itself.
It just won’t accomplish much if you don’t remember to add your Stripe transactions to it. Your best bet is to send transactions of all types to apps like Google Sheets or Airtable because you can use them to sort everything out later. New payments and new charges in Stripe? Send them to new spreadsheet rows automatically so you can record each transaction in its fullest possible detail. New refund requests? Turn your Airtable base into a to-do list for the sales team.
Once the data is in your spreadsheet, you can create formulas to summarize everything going on in Stripe. You can use these sheets to back up your purchase data, share data with other teams or software tools, or collect payment information from multiple assets.
The key? Once you have all your information in one place—calculated how you like—you can turn your spreadsheet into something of a personal business dashboard.
Send chat notifications for Stripe activity
There was a tradition in 20th-century offices: whenever someone would make a sale, they’d ring a bell. Now, you can automate that, true, but there’s so much more you can do. Connect Stripe to your Slack channel, and you can notify your team about all sorts of transactions. If there’s a failed payment and you need someone to check on it, you can create a specific Slack channel message to ensure the right people check it out.
The same is true for Stripe transactions when good news drops. Send the notification of a new subscription to the channel that talks about recurring revenue. Separate that from the Slack channel that talks about new customer acquisition. Assemble it any way you like because it only takes a simple Zap to get a notification for any Stripe transaction that registers to your system.
Turn Stripe transactions into emails
Maybe you’d prefer to get your transaction details over email instead of Slack. If you’re running a smaller business, it can be more efficient to send these notifications to an email inbox. For example, shared email inboxes can alert entire teams to new Stripe transactions.
Since you can use Zaps to generate outbound Gmail messages, you don’t have to limit this to alerting your team. Make it a customer-facing automation for transactional emails and follow-ups. If you accept a new payment in Stripe, you can even set up Gmail to create a draft for your review before you send it. You can also hook up Stripe to Email by Zapier, an app designed to expand the reach of your automations.
Add new customers to your mailing list or CRM
The best thing for a business is repeat business. And while you may not make a subscription-based sale every time, you can link Stripe with your favorite newsletter software to turn your customers into an audience.
Once you’ve got your customers subscribed, you can send them follow-up emails or ding them with occasional discount codes to spur more sales. Zapier integrates with AWeber, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and more—so your options are nearly limitless here.
It’s also a good idea to add those new customers to your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Your CRM is only as useful as it is accurate and up to date—and that includes tracking new customer data from Stripe.
Whenever a new purchase is detected in your Stripe account, these Zaps use that data to create (or update) a customer profile in SendinBlue, HubSpot, or Pipedrive. That way, your records stay updated, and you can easily stay in touch with and nurture your customers.
Add sales data to your accounting app
Counting money? It sounds a lot more fun than it actually is. And as you grow your business, it’s only going to get more difficult to manually track every new charge and payment to your accounting system.
You can use Zapier and Stripe to keep your accounting software automatically up to date—and keep tabs on difficult transactions like refunds—so your bottom-line numbers always add up.
Build a better payment collection system
If you spend too much time in Stripe with your calculator app on your phone and a vein popping in your forehead, it’s a sign something’s gone wrong somewhere.
Set up the right automation system, and you won’t have to hope for fewer customers just so you can have a breath and catch up. You can build a payment collection system that scales with your business so there’s nothing left to do but grow.
This is just the start of what you can do with Stripe and Zapier. What will you automate first?
This article was originally published in June 2020, with previous contributions by Hannah Herman. It was most recently updated by Nicole Replogle in November 2024.