Stripe is a popular payment gateway used by hundred thousand of business accross the world. Stripe website and apps are quite nice and usable, but if your main tool is Gmail in your daily work, as might be the case of support teams, you may found interesting Contacts Inbox. This Gmail add-on provides extra information at a glance about senders, as it integrates Google Contacts and Stripe as a verified partner.
Gmail Google Contacts integration: sender profile in a sidebar
As soon as a message is opened, the add-on shows in a sidebar relevant information about sender retrieved from your Google Contacts address book, as the company and position, email, phone, labels and notes. In addition, you can easily modify this information directly from the add-on. Thus, you can keep updated your contact information without leaving your inbox. In case you need the whole contact information, the add-on provides a direct link to the profile in Google Contacts. You can also add to your Google Contacts address book any new contact by filling the main fields and saving it.
Gmail Stripe integration: your customers information at a glance
Stripe integration is one of the most interesting things of this add-on as you can easily know if the sender of an email is your customer and also how much this person spent in your products or services. Therefore your reply can be more suitable. Stripe integration is made via API Keys to maximize the security and control of the accounts. The keys never leaves your add-on environment in your Gmail account.
Once Stripe accounts are configured there are two places where the information is displayed. On the one hand, there is a summary in the main card of the add-on where you can find whether the sender is client or not as well as the total spent and current subscriptions (only premium). Additionally, if you have the premium plan, you can see the details of the recent payments and subscriptions.
From payment management screen you can see recent transactions and create manual payments and refunds. From subscription management screen you can subscribe/unsubscribe your customer from any of your plans.
Total spent information is calculated every few hours and depending on the number of transactions it can take a while. You can manage a Stripe cache in add-on Settings in order to minimize this calculations, specially if you only have monthly subscriptions. This cache makes use of a Spreadsheet to store the last data retrieved from your customers. That’s why the add-on requires permissions to read/write Spreadsheets in your Google Drive.
Working with teams: sharing information
Stripe integration seems to be valuable for support teams where it is always good to know the customer profile before answering. Large companies probably have expensive CRM tools for their support teams, but SMEs can benefit from a simple solution like this. However there is two issues to deal with:
- Sharing Google Contacts information
- Sharing Stripe customers information
The first one is solved by enabling the domain shared contacts, but you need a Google business/enterprise account. Once enabled, the add-on gives the possibility to work with domain shared contacts just by choosing that option in Settings.
The second one is solved by the own add-on (only with business plan). It provides a mechanism to share Stripe accounts with other add-on users that don’t need to be registered in Stripe. The procedure is quite simple: from Settings, there is a section where the sharer can enable a sharing window for collaborators to add the selected Stripe accounts. The sharer can set the access level to this accounts (Summary only, Read only, or Read/write) and must enter collaborators emails and send a sharing key to them. Collaborators can add shared accounts from the corresponding section in Settings from their add-ons, just by entering the sharer email and sharing key (before sharing time window finishes).
Pricing: free and paid versions
Contacts Inbox has a Free plan that comes with interesting features that allow you to try the add-on. Free plan includes full Google Contacts integration except Domain shared contacts and lets you to configure one Stripe account that only provides information about whether the sender is customer or not, as well as an external link to the customer page in your Stripe.
Next it is the Premium plan that includes all the Stripe details: a summary in the main screen with the total spent by the sender/customer and current subscriptions (if any), but also specific cards to manage the payments and subscriptions directly from the add-on. From that management cards you will be able to check recent transactions, create charges and refunds and see the subscriptions of any customers to cancel or even create new subscriptions. This plan comes with a 30-day free trial, so you can try all premium features for one month without paying anything.
The Business plan includes all features from Premium and adds specific team work features as the possibility of enabling domain shared contacts or sharing Stripe accounts with other members of the team in a controlled way as explained before.
Finally, there is an Entreprise plan with special price for those companies that need many installations of the add-on within the same domain. With Enterprise subscription all the add-ons installed through domain accounts will have the same features of the Business plan. So, if your team has more than 5 members, you might be interested in this plan.
Current pricing and the details of every plan can be found in comparative table in the official pricing page. The subscription to any of the paid plans must be done directly from the add-on once installed.
Installation of Contacts Inbox Gmail add-on
The installation of this add-on is as simple as other Gmail add-ons. In Gmail, you will find a plus + icon on the right side to open the Google Workspace Marketplace and you can search “Contacts Inbox” there.