Today, stripe removed dashboard functionality that stopped us doing business

[dan_m2k]

TLDR. Business impacting dashboard functionality removed. Need a drop in replacement for stripe. Oh, and support sucks.

We use a couple of stripe integrations for our website and have probably done £50k of transactions in the last few months.

Stripe has basic inventory management through products, SKUs, quantities and attributes.

Today, a non technical member of my team went to amend and add product availability. The options for editing or creating product/SKU inventory were gone, this looked like a broken dashboard.

Stripe support wasn’t good. At all. Email and phone are basically a messaging service with a robotic sounding “we’ll get back to you in 24h” - in fairness their reply was quicker. Just unhelpful.

They told me that the API had changed. I told them we weren’t talking about the API, we use the dashboard.

Then it transpires that their support advice of deleting and creating a product wouldn’t work either, both new and edit product were affected.

Then an apparent escalation reveals that this is apparently a deliberate change and the functionality has been removed. Super.

Now we apparently have to write our own front end to stripe to just update quantity or even set it active or not.

Aside from an obvious regression in functionality, support clearly hadn’t been briefed and sent us chasing our tales for a few unproductive hours.

Guess we’re not using stripe anymore.

HN: what’s a good stripe replacement?

[patio11]

I work at Stripe and happened to see this thread a few minutes after we had started an incident response to resolve the underlying bug.

So, long story short: We did a deploy yesterday for a thing which is not obviously related to the Dashboard's product SKU editing screen. There was an unplanned interaction between some work done for that deploy and the Dashboard product SKU editing interface; this resulted in some users having partially degraded HTML shipped to them (without the fields for editing SKU inventory quantity and SKU active/inactive status).

After we became aware that this happened due to Dan's comments, we opened an incident, diagnosed the regression, put a temporary fix in place, and started working on a more permanent fix.

I'm sorry we dropped the ball with respect to the support inquiry about this; our representative came to the conclusion that this was a planned change in functionality, even though this particular interaction was not planned. We'll look into how that happened and correct it.

[sching]

I also work at Stripe and have been working on remediating these Dashboard workflow issues. We've pushed comprehensive fixes for the regressions. I'm also looking into our support representative's initial misunderstanding of the issue. I appreciate the flag here and would encourage anyone to get in touch with us directly via https://support.stripe.com/ with questions if they notice any unexpected behavior post-fix.

[dan_m2k]

As to your colleague, thank you. If I can be of any help in helping identify where support went wrong, please hit me up.

[patio11]

(We're on it -- more detail after the bug is squashed.)

[trcollinson]

I know this is not the answer you want to hear (and trust me this should NOT be the answer). But if they have an API that allows you to make these updates, it might be best to use something like Postman to hit the API to make the update while you find a drop in replacement for Stripe. I'm not saying it's a long term solution. But I wouldn't want your business to suffer while you are figuring this out. If I can be of assistance let me know.

[dan_m2k]

Postman is a decent stop gap, thanks for the suggestion

[saluki]

Looks like this change wasn't intended and hopefully stripe rolls back out the functionality you were using.

I'm a huge fan of Stripe so I'd give them a chance to get this resolved for you before switching.

The stripe api is great to work with so you might benefit having a custom web application built to interact with it and make things more efficient on your end and not depend on their dashboard.

[larrik]

Doing this through the python library might be even easier than Postman

[dan_m2k]

Despite the issues with support, I’m pleased to report how Stripe’s engineering team understood, took ownership and resolved this nasty little bug as it turned out.

I couldn’t believe a dev-friendly and sane org like stripe would intentionally remove functionality so haphazardly.

The resolution is the result of some good folk at Stripe and hopefully the feedback will improve support and escalation. ^DM

[larrik]

Stripe has bugs sometimes. I've personally submitted at least 5 that were verified by them as bugs, across all areas of their project. Most recently, they started generating phantom "subscription updated" events with nothing actually changed (which my system did NOT like).

That said, we've only been on Stripe for a year and a half, and they've made some real progress in that short time, even though I thought they were great before all of that. Compared to most of their competitors, they are still the best to work with.

For the future, there's also an IRC channel that you can reach out to for general help, in addition to the ways you tried.

[cjbprime]

I think Braintree's the largest Stripe competitor, been a while since I've looked at it though.

You might try asking about this change on Stripe's IRC channel for an immediate response, if that still exists -- #stripe on freenode.