Take card payments with Stripe

Stripe lets your store take card, Apple Pay and Google Pay payments from customers almost anywhere in the world. It is the usual way to get paid in dollars, pounds and euros, so it is what you want if you sell to customers outside India. You connect your own Stripe account, and every payment lands in your Stripe balance — SitesPlaced is never in the middle and takes no cut.

Before you start

You need a Stripe account that can already accept payments. If you don't have one, sign up at stripe.com and finish their onboarding — they will ask for your business details and a bank account to pay you into. If Stripe hasn't finished verifying you yet, connecting here will fail with a message telling you so; that's Stripe's check, not ours.

Create a restricted key

Stripe gives you two kinds of secret key. The secret key (sk_live_…) can do everything in your account — move money, read your customers, change your settings. A restricted key (rk_live_…) can do only the specific things you allow. We ask for a restricted key, and you should never paste your full secret key into any website builder, ours included.

1. 1Sign in to Stripe and open Developers → API keys (dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys).
2. 2Click Create restricted key.
3. 3Give it a name you'll recognise later, such as *SitesPlaced store*.
4. 4Set these four permissions to Write or Read as listed, and leave everything else as None: Checkout Sessions — Write, PaymentIntents — Read, Webhook Endpoints — Write, Refunds — Write.
5. 5Click Create key, then Reveal it and copy the value. It starts with rk_live_.
6. 6In your store dashboard, open Settings → Payments & invoices, paste the key into the Stripe card, and click Connect Stripe.

What we do with your key

• It is encrypted before it is stored, and it is stripped out of every page your website sends to a browser. It never appears in your site's source.
• It can only do the four things you allowed. Even if it leaked, nobody could move your money or read your customer list with it.
• Payments go straight from your customer to your Stripe balance. We never hold your money, and we cannot pay ourselves out of it.
• Disconnect removes the key from our systems and deletes the notification endpoint we set up in your Stripe account. You can also delete the key yourself in Stripe at any time — that stops it working immediately.

What your customers see

Once connected and switched on, checkout shows a Card payment option. Choosing it sends the customer to Stripe's own payment page, and back to your store afterwards. Because it's Stripe's page, Apple Pay and Google Pay appear automatically on phones that support them, and the extra bank-approval step European and UK cards require is handled for you. Which wallets and extras (Klarna, Afterpay, Link) appear is up to your own Stripe dashboard settings — turn them on there and they show up at your checkout with nothing to change here.

Sales tax

You are the seller, so sales tax is yours to handle — we never calculate it. If you use Stripe Tax, turn it on in your Stripe dashboard, then tick Add tax at checkout using Stripe Tax on the Stripe card in your settings, and Stripe will work the tax out at checkout. In the United States, states can require you to collect sales tax once you pass a certain amount of sales there (commonly around $100,000 or 200 orders in a year, but it varies). If you're near that, talk to an accountant.

Refunds

Refund from your Stripe dashboard. The order in SitesPlaced is marked refunded automatically. If the order included digital downloads, the download link is *not* switched off automatically — a refund isn't always a withdrawal of the files. To disable it, open the order and use Disable on the download.

If something goes wrong