This article was published on February 6, 2013

Stunning brings dunning to Stripe: This third-party service emails customers when there’s payment issues


Stunning brings dunning to Stripe: This third-party service emails customers when there’s payment issues

Stripe has been making pretty big inroads in the digital payments space with its approach to fixing the tangled mess that is payment processing. It’s only available in the US and Canada for now, though.

The startup offers a developer-friendly way for merchants to accept credit card payments on the Web. And it upped its game last October with the launch of Stripe Connect, a new service designed to allow developers to offer payment facilities to their users too – so store creators, website builders, invoicing systems and the likes.

And just a few weeks ago, the first version of Stripe Checkout launched, as it strives to make Stripe even easier to integrate. Throw into the mix its new Pay With Stripe button, and a third-party Stripe iPad app (tapping Stripe’s API) to let merchants manage their Stripe account and receive payment, well, then it seems the company really is going from strength to strength.

Now, however, another third-party Stripe tool has hit our radar, and it goes by the name of Stunning, promising to bring much-needed features to Stripe, one of which is dunning.

From Stunning to dunning

If that’s a foreign concept to you, let us explain. Dunning is the process of communicating with customers to ensure swift payments and settling of bills. It’s an iterative process, with the first step involving perhaps a short friendly email, all the way through to ‘PAY NOW OR BE SUED’-style letters. Well, you get the gist.

Now, if you’re still awake after that explanation, this is where Stunning hopes to help. It automatically sends emails to users when their registered credit card is due to expire, giving them time to update with new billing info before their account is cancelled.

StunningMoreover, it can send email receipts to customers, refund confirmations, trial expirations, plan-change notifications and more. It also gives merchants a daily figure on how much money they made on a given day, while the accompanying iOS app lets them receive push notifications when they get paid, or even if someone cancels their account.

Stunning uses Stripe Connect, launched last October, to connect with your Stripe account, which takes a matter of seconds.

In terms of pricing, well, there are three tiers – the free service only gets you alerts, which constitutes an event dashboard, daily total and access to the iOS app (and thus push notifications). The second ‘receipts’ tier gives you access to receipt and refund emails, costing $10/month. To get access to the full dunning features, it will set you back $30/month.

➤ Stunning: Web | iOS

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Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock

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