Taking card payments with Stripe

To charge for anything — a course price, or places on an invitation — your site needs a Stripe account connected. Without one, a price is a number nobody can pay.

Connecting

1. In Site Admin, find the payments section and start the Stripe connection.
2. You are taken to Stripe to either sign in to an existing account or create one.
3. Stripe asks for your organisation’s details and a bank account to pay out to. This is their process, not Grapevine’s, and what they ask for depends on your country.
4. When it finishes you are returned to your site, which now shows the account as connected.

Allow time for this. Stripe is verifying a real organisation and may ask for documents.

Who holds the money

You do. Payments go into your Stripe account, and Stripe pays out to your bank on its own schedule. Grapevine takes its fee from each transaction as it happens.

The practical consequence is where to go when something is wrong:

• A receipt, a refund, a dispute — your Stripe dashboard. Grapevine cannot refund money it never held.
• A payment that succeeded but did not enrol anybody — tell Grapevine, with the date and the last four digits.

Testing it

Before you advertise a paid course, buy a place on it yourself with a real card and then refund yourself in Stripe. It costs a few pence in fees and tells you the whole path works — the price shows, the payment goes through, the enrolment happens, and the money lands where you expect.

It is worth doing once per site rather than trusting that it must be fine.

Until it is connected

Leave your courses free, or use invitations with zero price. A priced course on a site with no Stripe account shows a price and then cannot complete, which is a worse experience than a course that was never advertised.

Your currency

Set separately, and worth setting before you price anything — see Your currency.