Getting paid
Connecting Stripe, what “charges enabled” means, and when the money reaches your bank.
Money from your store goes to your own Stripe account, not to eCrate and then on to you. eCrate never holds your sales revenue. That is worth knowing up front, because it explains most of what follows: the rules about when you can sell and when you get paid are Stripe's rules, and eCrate cannot override them.
Connecting Stripe
Go to Settings → Payments and start the connection. Stripe asks for your business details, an identity document, and the bank account it should pay into. You are handed back to eCrate when it is done.
No account
Nothing started yet.
Checkout refuses orders
Onboarding started
Stripe has your account and still wants something from you.
Checkout refuses orders
Charges enabled
Stripe has everything it needs.
Your store can sell
The three states matter because the middle one looks finished and is not:
- No account. Nothing has been started. Checkout refuses every order.
- Onboarding started. Stripe has your account but still wants something — a document, a bank detail, sometimes a second identity check. Your dashboard says so, with a link back into Stripe. Checkout still refuses every order.
- Charges enabled. Stripe has everything it needs. Your store can sell.
"Charges enabled" is not a setting in eCrate and there is no way to switch it on from here. It is a flag Stripe sets on your account, eCrate reads it, and checkout refuses an order whenever it is false. If your store is not taking orders, this is the first thing to check.
When the money arrives
- A shopper's card is charged when they place the order, and the payment is confirmed by Stripe telling eCrate it succeeded — not by the shopper reaching a thank-you page. An order only becomes paid on that confirmation, so a shopper who closes the tab has still bought the thing.
- The money lands in your Stripe balance, minus Stripe's card fee and minus eCrate's 2%.
- Stripe then pays your balance out to your bank on its own schedule, which you set in your Stripe dashboard. New accounts usually wait longer for the first payout. That timing is entirely Stripe's; eCrate has no lever on it.
- Card fee — Stripe’s, at whatever rate your own Stripe account has. eCrate adds nothing to it.
- eCrate 2% — taken out of the same payment, returned in full if you refund the order.
- Yours — lands in your own Stripe balance, and Stripe pays it out to your bank on its schedule.
Widths are illustrative. The only exact figure here is eCrate’s 2%.
Refunds
Refund from the order's own page. The refund goes back through Stripe to the card that paid. eCrate's 2% on a refunded order is returned to you as well, so a refunded sale costs you nothing in platform fees.
If the order earned an affiliate a commission, the refund reaches that too — see Selling through partners, which explains the one case where it cannot.
Chargebacks
If a shopper disputes a charge with their bank, it appears at Dashboard → Disputes with the deadline for responding. Upload your evidence there. eCrate passes it to Stripe; the card network decides. Nobody can appeal that decision on your behalf.
Things that catch people out
- A test card will not work on a live account. Stripe's test cards only work against test keys.
- Your storefront can look perfectly finished and still refuse every order if charges are not enabled. Place a real order on your own store as the last step of setting up, and refund it.
- The bank account Stripe pays into is changed in Stripe, not in eCrate.