Hi,
Looking for recommendations to integrate a payment processing function into my AppSheet app. My app would act as a broker who brings two parties together. So would like the payments be disbursed from one party to another as well as a percentage of the sale to me for bringing them together.
Also, please advise a solution that has reasonable rates that won’t significantly increase the cost of doing these transactions.
I wouldn’t recommend AppSheet for any B2C scenario
I looked into this and you could try to use something like Paypal, Stripe etc via an API. But the issue I had was always that you’d edn up writting the full card details to the Google Sheet, which can never be truely deleted.
A better option might be to use the API to send the amount and customer to an accounts package like Quickbooks or Xero. That then sends the invoice and handles payment. You could then also use the same API to check if the invoice has been marked off as paid.
I think the best setup, from a security standpoint, would be to integrate with a payment platform through that payment platforms api.
The only thing your app does is create a record in your table, and then you have a bot that shoots that records information to your payment processing api.
That API then goes through the whole process over there, creating an independent invoice, or whatever it’s called over there, sending an email to a person, handling all of the card processing details, all of that’s handled over there.
Then you have to create some script or something, like a zapier thing or integromat or something, that’s watching for this sort of confirmation information. Then that thing takes your confirmation information, finds the appropriate record in your Google sheet or wherever, and makes the update appropriately.
That’s a lot of complicated bits, But ultimately in that scenario there is no confidential information being exchanged really. The only info that is passing from one server to the next is an email, a price, maybe some general information, and if you want to get super fancy you could do line items too.
But the idea is the app triggers the payment cessing platform, everything’s done over there, the which then updates the database when things are done.
Do others here with more experience have recommendations or pros/cons regarding PayPal, Stripe, or other alternatives? Is one or another service easier to set up connections for as an app creator?
FWIW, here’s one comparison: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/16289-stripe-vs-paypal.html.
Interesting resource re Stripe/Apps Script integration: https://groups.google.com/g/google-apps-script-community/c/9h-QLqZlcUE/m/nGK7i-iNAQAJ
And, another–this one mediated via an actual GSheet: https://www.labnol.org/stripe-payments-google-sheets-210913. If AppSheet can handle custom spreadsheet functions defined via Apps Script, it seems like anyone could use this OOTB to get a Stripe payment link into an app.
@Bellave_Jayaram @Grant_Stead @Stefan_QREW
Anyone got anything to add?
It’s a worthwhile general question applicable to many use cases.
I’m particularly interested in how anyone might be tackling this in combination with some mechanism for managing SaaS subscriptions for a given quantity of monthly users. I’d love an easy way to have a customer buy a subscription to my app for x monthly users (not explicitly identified individuals, but rather “seats” shared among more than x people, but with no more than x using the app in a given month) for y months (so far so good) and then (here’s what I haven’t found a good way to accomplish systematically instead of manually) prevent the customer from exceeding x user logins within the rolling 30-day period that AppSheet references for billing me.
Also looping in @Jonathon , who has deep experience managing user authentication and other AppSheet integrations via API.
THAT… you won’t be able to control
The solution there is to establish your own authentication–e.g, via AWS Cognito.
Just throwing this out there, last week is zapier released a whole bunch of new integrations with app sheet - one of them was with stripe.
So if you don’t want to go the route of figuring things out yourself, you could just make use of zapier.
Looks handy–at least for performing actions in AppSheet when triggered by events in Stripe (or PayPal). It doesn’t look like any AppSheet triggers are available.
Connect your AppSheet to Stripe integration in 2 minutes | Zapier
Connect your AppSheet to PayPal integration in 2 minutes | Zapier
Over the last 24 hours, I dived into Stripe and agree it seems flexible, extensible, usable at different skill levels, and generally fit-to-purpose. I’ve done some manual set-up, and plan to look into adapting some of their sample Node.js functions to Apps Script for using with AppSheet. If you happen to know of any existing library available to utilize, please share
@Jonathon , what’s your technique for tracking a customer’s monthly active users? Any ideas from the recent Is there any way to get the date and time a user was last online conversation on the right track?
@juanpa , I see you’re processing payments. Do you have any guidance or experience to share?
FYI, think I figured it out: Reference User’s Last Access Timestamp.
Per @juanpa , Zapier is indeed a solution: Add Payments to Appsheet - No Code Required - Google Cloud Community .
I think this post is quite useful for this purpose. It’s focused on integrating Paypal, but I suppose it can be useful for integrating other payment solutions as well.
