Stripe payment/invoice confusion

[Steve_W]

I’m confused about the Stripe integration with Bubble, in particular the interplay between the “Charge the current user” action, payment history, and invoices.

I have everything “working” in that the action properly charges the user, it appears in my stripe test console, etc etc, however I don’t understand why “Charge the user” doesn’t create any payment history that the user can see when I direct them to the stripe customer portal (which I have configured and am using the Stripe Customer Portal plugin to create links and send the user there. This also seems to work fine).

If I create an invoice, add an invoice item, and then pay the invoice, THEN I can see an invoice history in the portal, but charges made outside the context of an invoice seem to go…well not nowhere because I can see them on my end and manually send a receipt via Stripe, but there’s something here I’m not understanding.

Stripes own docs say that in the customer portal the user should be able to see their payment history, but maybe that’s inaccurate, or fails to note that you can only see payments that were invoiced as opposed to purely “charged”.

Related to this, while the “charge the current user” action will prompt for payment information if there isn’t any, the “pay an invoice” action does not, though it will work if the information was already entered somewhere else.

Right now, my best guess as to the order of operations to make this work, if a user clicks on a “pay now” link is something like:

1. Get the user to enter their cc information (if you don’t already have it)
2. Create an invoice
3. Create an invoice item
4. Pay the invoice.

This feels like I’m missing something basic in this process. Can anyone shed any light for me? Stripe’s documentation isn’t helping a whole lot here, and I haven’t found many good step by step guides for this for bubble.

Thanks!

[ramzizi]

I was having the same problem. I charge my customers with a payment intent so it doesn’t create an invoice and won’t show up on the customer portal. I talked to support and the only thing that shows in the portal is invoice history.

Maybe if more people complain to support they’ll add payment history to the customer portal

[Steve_W]

When you say “talked to support” you mean Stripe support, yes? I assume so since they’re the ones that control what goes on in the stripe portal?

My solution above is working, mostly, the only downside so far is that when I use the “pay an invoice” action I don’t get redirected to stripe to confirm as the payer, and that is a little confusing. For my current beta release, most of this is probably fine, but it looks like I’m going to have to use a more in depth plugin or roll my own API interactions to actually get this to behave how I want.