What Stripe is
Stripe is the dominant payment infrastructure for online businesses. Founded in 2010 by the Collison brothers, it processes card payments, ACH, wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), and increasingly recurring subscriptions, invoicing, marketplace payouts, fraud detection, and financial reporting. From Shopify-based DTC brands using Stripe through a payment gateway to SaaS companies using Stripe Billing as their core revenue engine, Stripe is the de facto payments layer of modern internet businesses.
The developer-first API design, clean documentation, predictable behaviour, robust webhooks, is what made Stripe win against incumbent payment processors that treated APIs as an afterthought.
Where it sits in the stack
For DTC e-commerce:
- Shopify Payments is the default checkout payment processor, but it runs on Stripe infrastructure under the hood
- Custom Stripe Checkout is common for non-Shopify stores or for specific high-conversion flows
- Subscription DTC (replenishment products, memberships) often uses Stripe Billing directly for the recurring revenue layer
For SaaS:
- Stripe Billing handles subscription pricing, billing cycles, dunning, proration
- Stripe Tax handles sales-tax calculation and remittance
- Stripe Invoicing handles B2B billing flows
- Stripe Revenue Recognition handles GAAP/IFRS-compliant revenue accounting
Why Stripe matters for analytics
For non-subscription businesses, Stripe is one data source among many. For subscription businesses, Stripe holds the true LTV signal. Tracking pixels capture the first purchase. Stripe captures every renewal, upgrade, downgrade, refund, and churn event. Without Stripe data in the attribution stack, subscription LTV is invisible to paid-media optimisation.
The right pattern: stream Stripe events (via Stripe webhooks) into the warehouse and the attribution layer so the full payment lifecycle is queryable alongside acquisition and engagement data.
Common patterns
- Webhook → server-side event for every successful payment, treated as a first-party conversion
- Subscription milestone events (trial → paid, renewal, upgrade, churn) forwarded to ad platforms for lifecycle-optimised campaigns
- Revenue reconciliation between Stripe (truth) and downstream analytics (forecast) to spot tracking gaps
- Cohort retention analysis built on Stripe’s subscription lifecycle data, not the application’s own state
FAQ about Stripe
Is Stripe just a payment processor?
Originally yes, today no. The platform has expanded into subscriptions (Stripe Billing), tax (Stripe Tax), invoicing, marketplace payouts (Stripe Connect), fraud (Stripe Radar), and revenue recognition. For many businesses Stripe is the financial-data backbone, not just the payment gateway.
How do I track subscription LTV with Stripe?
Stream Stripe webhook events into your warehouse, every payment, renewal, refund, and churn event becomes a queryable record. Cohort retention analysis on this data gives you actual LTV, not modelled estimates from initial purchase data.
Stripe vs PayPal vs Shopify Payments, what is the difference?
Stripe is the payment infrastructure. Shopify Payments runs on Stripe under the hood with Shopify-specific integration. PayPal is a separate payment processor with its own wallet and merchant network. Most modern stores accept Stripe-processed cards plus PayPal as an alternative payment method.