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Payments: Connecting to Stripe
Payments: Connecting to Stripe

This article will walk you through how to connect your GovOS Studio account to Stripe to be able to collect payments.

Andrew Liebelt avatar
Written by Andrew Liebelt
Updated over a week ago

The first step to setting up your form to be able to collect payments using Stripe is to find your API Secret Key, and to make sure that your phone number is verified in your Stripe account.

You will likely have verified your phone number when setting up your Stripe account, however just to be sure here is a link to documentation about this feature:

Phone Verification in Stripe

Additionally, when we first connect accounts we will make a charge and then refund it for authentication purposes. In order for this to happen your Address Verification Settings (AVS) must be turned off. Here is a guide from Stripe on how to ensure this is off:

Verification Checks in Stripe

Note that after you've authenticated you can turn AVS settings back on. This will only be needed when connecting Stripe to a new form.

Users with Administrator permissions can access a Stripe account’s API keys by navigating to the Developers section of the Stripe dashboard and clicking on API Keys.

Then once you have your API Secret Key you will go into the Form Editor and click on Add-ons --> Process Payments.

NOTE: We do not allow authentication and testing with a demo/test account. These must be credentials from a live account. 

After you've typed in your API Secret Key and click on Connect Account you will be taken to the page where you can customize the settings to get started.

Passing Stripe Fees onto end users

When it comes to passing Stripe fees, the passing of fees is not allowed by the law in all the countries that Stripe operates in. Therefore these fees would not be automatically passed on to the person making the payment, but rather the account holder for Stripe. 

In order to effectively pass those fees onto the end users you would need to use our Custom Convenience fee function to add the Stripe fees to be charged.

The easiest option is to use our Percentage + Set Fee option to add on the fees. Stripe typically charges 2.9% plus $0.30 for each transaction. So to mimic that you can use the following:

Because Stripe will take their fees out of the final charge you can also use an additional formula to make it more exact.

To include the Stripe fee in the final charge, calculate the gross amount, taking into consideration that increasing the final amount also increases the Stripe fee: the Stripe fee is a flat fee plus a percentage of the total charge.

The flat fee and the total charge percentage must be factored into the final charge amount to ensure that you receive the desired amount, after Stripe deducts the fee from the charge.

First we take your pricing structure :

  1.  Domestic charges 2.9% + 30¢ 

  2.  International card paying in USD 3.9% + 30¢

Then what the formula means is "The amount you charge" = ("The amount you want to receive + "the fixed part of the fee [ the 30 cents]" -Divided by: "1 - The percent part of the fee in decimal [ ie 0.029 or 0.039 ]")

Following that logic we get :

If you were to receive $10.00, and your fees are 2.9% + .3. The amount to charge is: (10 - 0.3) / (1 - 0.029).

If your fees are 3.9% + .3 the amount to charge is (10 - 0.3)  / (1 - 0.039)

If your fees are 4.9% + .3 the amount to charge is (10- 0.3)/ (1- 0.049)

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