Stripe is the world’s most popular online payment processor for many reasons. The signup process is quick, their platform is user friendly, and their support is world-class. For this reason, when it comes to selecting a payment processor for an ecommerce website, Stripe is a natural choice. 

Given how well Stripe is managed, it comes as no surprised that they are acutely focused on ensuring that both vendors and customers are protected against fraud and theft. In addition, Stripe wants to ensure that when customers transact with your business, there will be a very low likelihood of disputes or chargebacks. Stripe takes this very seriously, which means that even relatively few chargeback or disputes could put your Stripe account at risk and lead to the termination of their relationship with you. That means that you’d no longer be able to accept payment card payments on your website or charge amounts to customers’ payment cards from within our platform.

There is good news though!

Before you apply for a Stripe account and following the approval of your Stripe application, it’s important that your website outlines information the what services it provides, how it provides them, terms, conditions, and policies that relate to transactions with your business and you can be contacted.

Service Descriptions

When creating services, both primary (eg. Deep Home Cleaning) and extra service (eg. blinds), ensure that you provide a description of the service so that someone who is not familiar with your company or its services understands exactly what will be provided to them when they place a booking with your company. (provide an example for them)

Terms and Conditions

It’s extremely important that you outline all of the terms and conditions that any transactions with your business are subject to. Within the terms and conditions setup page, you’ll want to define the following policies.

i) Refund policy — Describe under what conditions customers can receive a refund for the goods or services that they’ve purchased

ii) Delivery policy — Describe how and where the services and products will be delivered and on what timeline.

iii) Warranty policy – Describe under what conditions customers can request that the services be reperformed or purchased goods can be returned or exchanged.

iv) Cancellation policy — Describe under what conditions customers can cancel appointments, subscriptions, or reservations and what, if any, financial penalty may accompany such a cancellation.

v) Promotions – Indicate the terms and conditions of any promotions including whether or not they only apply to one’s first order or only apply to orders following the first order.

vi) Free Trials – Explain how any free trials work, the time period that they cover, and any other conditions of the free trial.

vii) Safety and Respect – Outline the requirements that you have of the physical premises where you will be working. In this section you may reference your need for animals to be secured and for your staff to be treated with respect as they carry out their duties. Outline what will happen in the event that defined requirements are not met and how this could impact the delivery of services or goods to the customer.

Contact Information

Customers need to be able to contact you in the event of a question or problem with the provided goods or services. As a result, our platform requires that you provide the following information, which will be displayed in the footer of your website.

- Physical Address

- Phone Number

- Email Address

Legal Restrictions

If there are legal restrictions or considerations that relate to the product or service that you are selling, these must be outlined in your Terms and Conditions. You’ll need to also indicate how these restrictions or conditions could impact your customers and the delivery of any goods or services that they’ve paid for.

There are many other requirements that Stripe has for your website that you don’t need to worry about as these will be pre-populated on your website, including:

Purchase Currency

The purchase currency is noted on the order total on both the order page and the payment page.

Privacy policy

A privacy policy with standard wording, which you agreed to ahear to upon signing up for our platform, will appear on your website.

PCI Compliance, Encryption, and Digital Security

Notes on these items are included as standard in the privacy policy that will appear on your website.

Terms of promotions or discounts that are offered

The booking form makes it clear that:

- frequency discounts only pertain to future appointments 

- coupons discounts only apply to that one booking and not any future scheduled bookings

Logos of accepted payment cards

This is automatically displayed on the Stripe payment form.

For more information on ensuring that your website complies with Stripe’s information requirements, please visit the following link.

https://stripe.com/docs/checklist/website

For information on how Stripe assesses risk when deciding whether or not a business is eligible to use its services, please see the following link.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/business-risk-level-considerations-and-evaluation