Stripe Gateway 2.6 Beta and Recurring Payments adds support for existing cards

After nearly a month in development, the first beta of version Stripe Gateway 2.6 is available for testing. This upcoming release has quite a few significant improvements along with some bug fixes.

Existing Cards feature

Previously the Stripe Gateway has always required that a customer enter in their full card details in order to complete their purchase. In Stripe 2.6, logged in users will be presented with the ability to select a card they have used on a previous purchase or add a new card.

Uses will also be able to manage their cards associated with their Stripe account, including adding new cards, setting a new default card, removing a card, or update a card’s billing details. This form is included by default with the edd_profile_editor shortcode, but can also be included in a custom integration using the edd_stripe_manage_cards() function.

Because it’s helpful to know if this feature is being used, payments that use an existing card will have a flag set in post meta. We’ve included the ability to see this flag within the View Order Details in the ‘Payment Meta’ metabox, as well as a report in Downloads → Reports → Stripe Reports. This provides a graph showing the number of times a new card or existing card was used along with the revenue generated by each, to give store owners some insight into how the feature is affecting purchase behavior.

How does this work?
It’s important to note that the Existing Cards feature in Stripe Gateway 2.6 does not keep any credit card information on a store’s server or database. Stripe has an existing API that allows us to request the payment methods of an existing Stripe customer record. Since the Stripe and Recurring Payments extensions for Easy Digital Downloads keep this Stripe customer ID associated with the EDD Customer record, we can retrieve it for users who are authenticated into their accounts. Full card details are not available via this API, and neither the full card number nor verification code (CVC) can be accessed. This data is securely stored on the Stripe servers.

Statement Descriptor setting

Easy Digital Downloads has previously used a combination of the products purchased and/or store name to determine what the statement descriptor, which is what charges from the store look like on a customer’s bank statements. In version 2.6, we’re adding the ability to define a Statement Descriptor to help customers easily identify charges from a store. This setting also comes with an email token so a customer can be informed of what the charges will look like in their purchase receipts.

Auto-complete attributes

When inputting card details into the checkout form, Stripe Gateway now fully supports the standard autocomplete attributes, allowing customers to use payment methods they have stored in their browser’s form fill tools, or other programs that securely store their card data.

Stripe Radar support

Radar is Stripe’s built in fraud prevention tool. It gives account owners the ability to define rules for payments that present risk to the store in the form of fraudulent purchases. If a payment via Stripe triggers a rule that allows the charge, but presents the store owner to review it, the Stripe Gateway extension will add a payment note stating that it was flagged for review. It will also add a payment note if a payment has been manually approved after it’s been reviewed.

Additional enhancements

• Stripe Customer IDs migrated to customer meta, instead of user meta
• Refactored the Javascript for better abstraction and performance
• Improved flexibility of the card validation HTML5 attributes

Notable bug fixes

• Duplicate customer records created during failed payments
• Remove WP Version from the loading of the Stripe.js
• Naming convention conflict with other projects using Stripe class

Upgrades needed

In order to facilitate migrating the Stripe Customer IDs to the customer meta table, we’ve included an upgrade routine that will handle this process. This can easily be run by clicking the link that will be presented to admins via a WordPress Admin Notice. We’ve also included the ability for this upgrade routine to be run via WPCLI. More instructions on that can be found by clicking the “Learn more about this upgrade” link in the notice.

Beta testing

The first beta of Stripe Gateway version 2.6 is available to all valid license holders now, allowing store owners to try it out on their staging environments before going live with it. We’ve been using it on our site prior to releasing this beta and are confident with this version, but we encourage testing first to be sure. To learn how to opt-in to beta versions of our extensions, you can use this guide.