Products I've used

First few years (2015-2020)

• Create coupons via API, redeem coupons at checkout

• Publishers (partially) refunding payments or canceling a subscription in custom UI (using API)

• Customers deleting card on file, viewing subscription details next invoice, in custom UI

• Python API. Custom checkout built using Django and jQuery.

Recently (late 2020 and 2021)

• Stripe Connect – for Awesound's audio marketplace (purchases and subscriptions)

• Stripe-hosted Checkout

• Stripe on Next.js

Stripe Connect

• Service agreement type: "full" or "recipient"

Watch out if you want to support international sellers with split payments

• Destination Charges and Direct Charges only allow you to specify one payment recipient.

• You can pay additional parties (e.g., later pay the person who actually does the work, or give 5% to an affiliate) by using stripe.Transfer.create() But! This only works if the connected account is in your region, or the account has a recipient service agreement.

• But! If an account has a recipient service agreement, they can never have card_payments capability, so when they sell a product in EUR, it'll be converted to USD.

1. Eat the currency conversion fee, and have all non-US accounts as recipient for custom Transfers any amount, any time you like.

2. Have international sellers create two Connect accounts
• one full so you can use Direct Charges or on_behalf_of(with Destination Charges) to avoid currency conversion fees (when they're the "main recipient" aka "seller")
• one recipient to receive their delayed/affiliate payments (when they're the "affiliate")

3. Choose to not support split payments for international sellers, or find some other way to pay them (e.g., not using Stripe… Dare I mention… PayPal? Manual bank transfers?)
• This is the sacrifice I made. I'll worry about multi-recipient split payments later. For now, I just want to minimize payment processing fees, so I can pay each author more money.

Some "gotchas" to be aware of when setting up Connect for international sellers

Case 1. An international seller becomes an affiliate, but you can't pay them

• They earn $100 through sales on your platform. For each customer payment, there's automatically a transfer to their Stripe balance. Fine, as expected.

• Separately, they earn $2000 in affiliate referral fees. You owe them this money.
• You want to manaully pay them $2000 as a one-time, ad-hoc payout using Stripe Connect.
• Or, you want to automatically give them 5% of every sale of a seller they referred to the platform.
• Ooops, you can't! 😧

• You can only send cross-border payments if they've signed up with a recipient service agreement.

Case 2. Double currency conversion for international sellers, costing 2% in fees

• ✅ When they refer somebody, you want to pay them $50 referral fee, and can easily do so as a cross-border Transfer. It's converted to their local currency. Nice one.

• 😧 They start selling in their local currency, to customers in their country. Suddenly, doing business with you, a US platform, is not ideal. A recipient account can't have the card_payments capability, but that's cool, you say; simply use Separate Charges and Transfers. They price their product in EUR and expect to receive €XX after your platform fees. Unfortunately, because you're using Separate Charges and Transfers, the full amount of EUR is converted to USD first. Then the amount you specify then is converted back to EUR – resulting in a 2% fee overall.

Case 3: An international affiliate becomes a seller

• You originally let them sign up as service agreement type recipient. (Makes sense, if you thought they'd mainly be an affiliate, and need to receive ad-hoc / split payments.)

• Now, you realise they've transitioned to mainly being a seller, not an affiliate, and you want to use on_behalf_of for purchases of their products: you'll have to ask them to start the Stripe Connect onboarding flow again, this time with service agreement type full.

• full will allow you to add card_payments as a capability, which in turn will allow you to use the on_behalf_ofparameter.

Case 4: You want to support one-time-purchase and subscriptions for your international sellers.

My requirements

• Each seller only needs to complete the Stripe onboarding once. All their earnings go to one Stripe Balance.

• Account type must be "Custom" or "Express" [not "Standard"]. (Standard accounts can leave your platform at any time without notice, and the customer is on the connected account.)

• Some sellers will be non-US, selling products in their home currency (e.g., EUR or GBP)
• We must avoid the currency double-conversion problem (Case 2 above).

• Each seller must be able to offer a mix of one-time-purchases (e.g., audiobooks) and subscriptions (e.g., paid podcast or multi-week course).

My solution

• For single-purchase items: Prices are defined in the Platform account for single-purchase items (audiobooks).
• Customers pay using a Destination Charge with on_behalf_of. Double currency conversion is avoided.

• For subscriptions: Prices are defined on the Connected account for monthly subscriptions (paid podcasts)
• Customers pay using a Direct Charge to the connected account.
• stripeAccount
• Double currency conversion is avoided. The platform listens for webhooks on connected accounts.

if (checkout_mode == "subscription" && connectStripeAcId) {
  // Customer is subscribing to a monthly paid podcast; use a Direct Charge to the platform account.
  // (Prices are defined on the connected account for recurring-subscription items like podcasts.)
  // connectStripeAcId will be present if publisher has completed Stripe Connect onboarding,
  //    and is ready to sell (has card_payments capability active)
  const stripeSession = await stripe.checkout.sessions.create(postData, {
    stripeAccount: connectStripeAcId,
  });
  res.json(stripeSession);
} else {
  // checkout_mode == "payment", use Platform account
  // (Prices are defined in the Platform account for single-purchase items like audiobooks.)
  const stripeSession = await stripe.checkout.sessions.create(postData);
  res.json(stripeSession);
}

stripePromise = loadStripe(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_PUBLIC_KEY, {
    stripeAccount: connectStripeAcId, // e.g., "acct_1234ABCDFBHb3LtaI",
});

Case 5: You want to move your sellers to your new Stripe account

• It's easy to contact Stripe support and ask them to copy over customers (individuals who made a purchase) to your new Stripe account.

• It's NOT trivial to move the Connected Accounts over to your US Stripe account. It might even be impossible, I'm not sure. You want to be sure that the Platform account you're using when onboarding sellers is the main Stripe account you plan to use for years into future.