Software

How to integrate Stripe payments in Python apps?

There are many different payment processing companies and services existing all over the planet. This field is also moderately competitive, with many companies trying their best to outpace the competition by introducing new features or improving the existing ones.

Stripe is an excellent example of one such company – an Irish-American software provider offering its clients multinational financial services in the form of APIs and payment-processing software. The main fields of work for Stripe are mobile applications and e-commerce websites.

It was created back in 2009 in California and has switched the location of its headquarters several times since. The company made several acquisitions and signed multiple partnerships over the years. One of the most recent examples is a five-year contract with Ford Motor Company. This partnership was initiated at the beginning of 2022, with Stripe becoming responsible for customer-oriented transactions such as reservations and vehicle orders.

The company offers multiple different features and services in the field of payment management. Stripe Connect was introduced in 2012 – a payment solution designed to enable payments to be integrated directly into products. An anti-fraud toolset called Radar was released in 2018, promising detection and blocking of illegitimate transactions if they are considered fraudulent. Other products of Stripe include Payment Links, Stripe Tax, Stripe Capital, Data Pipeline, and more.

Other businesses of Stripe include a publishing company, a business loan service, a solution for investing in carbon removal research, and a user identity verification service. It is a very successful business and is often considered one of the notable players in the payment processing services market.

To be fair, Stripe is also not exactly perfect as a payment processing solution. It has its own share of advantages and shortcomings, some of which may be critical to a specific audience.

Stripe is highly customizable, can work with a variety of different currencies, and supports multiple payment methods all over the planet. Any competent developer would be able to implement many different features and ideas using Stripe’s extensive toolset. Stripe can also operate in 43 different countries around the world, and its security measures are second to none (with a PCI Service Provider Level 1 certificate – the highest possible grade for any payment-related business).

Stripe’s capabilities in terms of in-person payments are very limited since it is an e-commerce-oriented company, first and foremost. Its processing rates are relatively high, with separate fees for international transactions and currency conversion. Last but not least is Stripe’s high entry barrier in terms of implementation. The software and its toolset are developer-oriented, meaning that anyone without proper knowledge in this area would have a lot of difficulty setting up payment gateways and other features.

Expanding upon this issue, we will explain how Stripe can be implemented in an application using Python. Stripe itself is a payment processing solution, but it still needs a framework of sorts to integrate itself into a website or an application. This can be done using a programming language such as Python, with FastAPI being one of the most famous examples of this case.

FastAPI is a well-known web framework created to create application programming interfaces (APIs), as its name suggests. It is a relatively new framework since it was initially released at the end of 2018. However, it managed to gather a lot of popularity in a short time frame and is now used in many different API-related situations.

Pairing Stripe with FastAPI allows for the creation of a stable and secure payment gateway to be integrated into an application or a website. This is where the issue of a high entry barrier comes back – Stripe itself is not easy to work with for non-developers, and FastAPI is a web framework by nature, which implies a developer-oriented customer base in the first place.

Luckily, there is a solution to this issue – customers who do not have sufficient levels of developer-oriented knowledge can rely on no-code AI development solutions such as Lazy AI. Lazy AI can offer a vast library of pre-existing templates and a versatile AI engine that makes even the most complicated tasks several times more manageable.

Going back to the topic at hand, there is an entire template that Lazy AI can offer to users who want to create a Stripe payment page to be integrated into a Python application. This combination of FastAPI and Stripe APIs based on a Lazy AI template can retrieve the status of a checkout session, request logs, CORS, and more.

The template itself consists of both a backend and a frontend. The backend uses FastAPI to establish a checkout session to receive its status and other information. The frontend is used directly in a Python application to allow for an integration of this payment page into the customer’s application. This template supports subscriptions and one-time payments, making it versatile and flexible enough to accommodate a number of different use cases.

Only two environment secrets are needed for this template to be ready – the Python application’s domain, where the frontend is hosted, and the secret Stripe API key. The former should be relatively easy to obtain, while the latter is located in a Stripe dashboard under the “Developers” category and the “API keys” menu.

At the end of the day, no-code app creation opens many different doors and gateways for non-developers to partake in a number of tasks, and Lazy AI is already highly flexible and valuable – despite being in the “active development” phase.

If you have any questions, please ask below!