Your Stripe account
Card money goes from your customer to you, through your account. We are not in the middle of it: we build the button that takes the payment, and the money never passes through us. That is only true if the account is yours.
READ THIS FIRST · THE MISTAKES THAT COST THE MOST
Where this goes wrong
- Match the business type to your registration. A sole trader who ticks Company, or an incorporated company that ticks Individual, is the single most common reason verification stalls and then gets refused.
- Use the business address, not a home address, unless the business genuinely trades from home. It has to be consistent with your public record.
- Turn on two-step verification before you connect anything. Stripe puts a passkey or a security key ahead of text messages for a reason: text messages can be intercepted.
- Give access to anyone else by inviting them with limited permissions, never by sharing your login.
- If you get an email that claims to be from Stripe, open stripe.com yourself and sign in there. Do not use the link in the message.
Before you start
If one of these is missing, get it sorted first. It is faster than stalling halfway through.
- The legal name of the business and the address it trades from. Stripe compares these against public records, so spell them the way your registration does.
- A bank account for the money to land in. In the business's name is the right answer.
- Photo ID for the person responsible for the business. Stripe may ask for more than once, and may ask for a recording of you as well.
- Your domain, plus the support email, phone number and address you want your customers given.
Do it in this order
Go to dashboard.stripe.com/register and create the account. Choose your country, then your business type — company or individual — then the business name and address exactly as registered.
Work through the checklist Stripe puts in front of you, then verify your business from the dashboard. Answer for the business honestly: what you sell, and your relationship to it.
Add the bank account the money should land in, and check the name on it matches the business.
Fill in the public details your customers will see: business name, website, support email, phone, address, and the short description that appears on a card statement. This matters more than it looks. If a customer does not recognise the charge on their statement, they can dispute it, and disputed money is held while it is argued about.
Wait until Stripe says the account is active before you take a real payment. Until then, use the test mode to run a payment through the whole flow and see it come through in the dashboard with no money moving.
Send us the account identifier from Settings, then Account. It is a public label for the account, not a password. Nobody who asks for your Stripe password is Stripe — Stripe's own staff never ask you for your keys.