Interview with Jay Smith, Dev Lead for Salable
By Louise Walden, Marketing Lead for Salable
L I believe that soon we’re going to complete the Salable integration with Stripe Connect, tell me more about it…
J Stripe Connect is more of an initiative — a way of working — than a specific feature. We’ll have the core in soon… then add to it over time.
L Would you describe it as having different layers?
J Yes…different functionality that we can introduce because of it. It gives Salable and the customer more flexibility and more options…that’s the headline.
L What benefit does this bring the Salable customer?
J Prior to this, customers would need to think about which payment provider they wanted to use and plug them into Salable. So that’s Stripe, Paddle and in the future, other payment providers. Now with Stripe Connect they can stay within Salable.
They won’t need to set-up a payment provider account separately, they’ll build their payment processing account…really simply…using ‘Salable Payments (powered by Stripe)’ or they have the option to use an existing account.
L So it will be seamless?
J Exactly and they’ll be able to do what they want; they may have their own Stripe account because of benefits like pre-agreed pricing, or they need an Enterprise Stripe account…or they want to use Paddle because they don’t want to solve the tax thing themselves. Or if they just want to rock-up and start selling apps, we don’t have to confuse them by making them choose payment processors…we can just handle the payments for them.
L Am I right in thinking that Stripe is one of the biggest payment processors?
J Yes — a lot of the payment processors are built on top of Stripe Connect, like Paddle and Shopify. Stripe has built their platform to be super flexible and powerful for this type of ‘white labelling’ experience. And I guess we’re an almost perfect customer for Stripe Connect, based on its functionality.
L And ‘the powered by Stripe’ is a further endorsement for Salable…
J Absolutely. And it means that Salable can manage the customer experience end-to-end.
L Is this move to Stripe Connect an accepted progression for a product like Salable?
J Yes, it’s a well established platform and most developers perceive it to be the ‘go-to’ for taking payments. We’d be silly and a different kind of organisation if we were trying to do it ourselves. Taking payments from a bank account is incredibly difficult…PCI, SCA compliance…if you focus on doing that, you become a banking organisation — rather than a software company.
L It’s a specialist thing…lots of regulation, governance, legal elements…
J…once you are in receipt of credit card details, you become subject to a whole set of new legalities. At Salable, we don’t actually have the customer payment details — it all goes through Stripe using encryption. And that means we’re not responsible for the governance of how those details are stored…but I don’t think anyone (in the industry) wants to be.
L Stripe has done this very well….no one needs to worry about it…
J There should always be a default to Salable where someone can just set-up their account and start to sell their app, really easily. With the option of using their own payment processor if they want to. In the beginning, we realised just how difficult it was to jump between these payment processors…the idea with Salable was to always remove that worry (and other worries too of course).
L You were saying that Stripe Connect opens up other functionality…what exactly?
J It opens up the door for any other monetary transactions like wallets for example…anything that Stripe offers as a service, we can then offer that too. But it also means we can extend and improve that functionality, it doesn’t cut us off from using other payment processors. It’s more about building the Salable payment processor — we’ve just happened to have chosen Stripe Connect to enable that. We can still integrate with others and provide more choice for the customer.
Stripe has built a reputation based on providing a payment platform to build upon…they’ve created all the tools to do that…for developers to build on top of.
L Finally, where can this integration lead Salable?
J There’s a host of other Stripe products like Treasury, the banking tool for example. They have fraud protection, analytics, climate/carbon off-set…
L…for marketing or proposition creation, these are great things to be able to talk about and provide our customers…
J…and Stripe are a pretty cool company — easy to work with and always seem to want to get better and improve what they do.
I’ve always said that if we could become only half as good as Stripe as a developer experience, we’re doing really well. Everything from their documentation to their products…
Stripe and also Paddle represent the pinnacle of what is really good and possible. It’s where we aspire to be.
