Stripe is the payment processor that Locally uses to capture payments from online shoppers and deposit those payments to your bank account. If your store is participating in Buy It Locally online payment orders or orders for Same-Day Delivery, you must have a Stripe account connected to Locally.
Set up and link your Stripe account to Locally
Load your Buy It Locally Setup & Configuration panel and jump to Step 5 and proceed to setup a Stripe account.
- To create a new account, follow along the instructions to create the account. It will automatically link to Locally upon completion
- To link an existing Stripe account, click the "sign in" button at the top right of the Stripe wizard to sign in. This will link your existing Stripe account to Locally
If you have multiple stores and will be selling higher priced merchandise on Locally (car racks, bicycles, boats, or similar), you may find it useful to go through Stripe's sales channel and be guided through setup by a Stripe representative. This is not required, but can help. To do so:
- Go to the Stripe contact page
- Complete the form. In "Anything Else?" copy/paste in the following: "We are setting up a Stripe account to go live as a Connect account on the Locally platform. Their Stripe account name is "Locally Platform" and the Account ID is acct_172VwgAAKdQR3wIt."
Restricted Businesses
If your store sells firearms, ammunition or any of Stripe's restricted product types, you may be ineligible to hold a Stripe account and therefore unable to offer payments for pickup or delivery on Locally even if those restricted brands or products aren't on Locally. Please review Stripe's policies if you have questions. If this affects you, you can offer Reservations for In-Store Purchases which are available to any retailer.
Stripe Best Practices
Fraud screening and mitigation
While fraud against retailers on the Locally platform is exceedingly rare, accepting online payments always includes a degree of risk. We encourage you to read up on best practices here: What are best practices for fraud screening and mitigation?
Get acquainted with the Stripe dashboard
You'll handle most, if not all, order related issues from your Locally order screens. All updates made on Locally order screens sync to Stripe automatically. However, Stripe contains detailed order information, payout details, and more, so we recommend having it bookmarked for easy access:
- Load the Stripe dashboard at anytime here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/dashboard
- To learn about managing payments, refunds, and disputes all from your Stripe Dashboard, head here: https://stripe.com/docs/dashboard
Manage your Stripe balance
To ensure prompt refunds to shoppers, you may want to keep some funds in your Stripe account. If you refund a shopper but your Stripe balance is too low, the refund will take longer than normal as Stripe will need to debit your bank account to obtain the funds before issuing the refund to the shopper.
To manage this, you have several options:
- You can directly add funds to your Stripe account as-needed. This fund will be used for all refunds, not just refunds that exceed your Stripe balance. When the fund is depleted, your Stripe balance will be used for refunds. Learn how to set this up here: https://stripe.com/docs/add-funds
- You can also rely on auto-debits from your connected bank account to cover pending balances if your balance goes negative, but this may cause a delay in the refund and make it more likely that a shopper will issue a chargeback. More info about auto-debits can be found here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/auto-debit-faq
- You can turn off Stripe's auto-deposit feature and only manually pay out a portion of your balance, leaving the rest of your balance in reserve against refunds. To do this, select "Manual Payouts" in your Stripe dashboard here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/payouts. There's more information on manual payouts here: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts#manual-payouts
Customer Statement FAQs
Customers may notice that the order charge on their statement is shown as "recurring" on their bank statement. This is expected within Stripe even though the order charge is non-recurring. Learn more here. https://support.stripe.com/questions/non-recurring-charges-show-as-recurring-on-customer-bank-statements