What's the status on API function: "return customer IDs by email address"?

[Tornado Twins]

I've seen it requested multiple times, by many people, but there seems to be no resolution yet. 

Stripe allows a customer to create multiple customer ID's on one email address. This is logical for subscriptions, etc. 

However, the API doesn't allow us to gather those customer ID's based on the email address of the user. 

This really hurts is, since our sales team constantly has to ask the customer what card they would like to use. 

And, those cards generally don't show up, since we only use the last customer ID that the user has created. 

So we'd either have to go back in time and gather all possible customer ID's for a user and keep track of those... 

which is quite a waste since Stripe already has that data (the search in Dashboard shows all of it). 

Can you please expose that data in the API rather than putting it on us developers?

If we can gather the data already by mass-exporting it, why not have us access it through the API? 

(Imagine us running through thousands of records just to get the right IDs). 

Thanks very much!

-Efraim

[Remi J.]

Hey Efraim.

This is definitely something we'd like to offer in the future in the API but we are not currently working on this as other things have a higher priority. The dashboard doesn't use the API directly for search so it's not as easy as opening up a search API endpoint and be done with it.

For now, you can only retrieve objects by their id in most cases and sometimes use the List APIs to filter objects on certain properties such as the `created` hash. If you want the ability to search or group customers by email, the best solution is to do a dump first using the List Customers API [1]. You'd store all this information in your database to allow you to search by customer email from now on. Then whenever you create a new customer or update one, you'd reflect that information in your database to be kept up to date.

It's definitely a lot more work on your end and we're aware of this limitation but it's also pretty common to store that information in your database in the first place too.

Hope this helps!

Remi

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/api#list_customers

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