How do I connect Stripe and receive payments?

How do I connect Stripe and receive payments?

Stripe is the only online card-payment provider on the platform, and setting up your Stripe account is a one-time step. Every online card payment a learner makes is a charge on your own Stripe account: you are the seller and merchant of record, the card statement shows the name set in that account, and the money is in your Stripe balance from the moment it is captured. Find a Ski School's commission is collected from the same payment as a Stripe application fee.

Where the money goes

Find a Ski School never holds your learners' payments and does not operate a stored-value wallet or escrow service. The charge is created on your own Stripe account, so:

• Nothing is paid out to you by us — there is no Find a Ski School payout step, because the payment never reaches us. What the learner pays, less our commission and less Stripe's processing fee, is already in your Stripe balance
• Your own payout schedule — Stripe pays out from that balance to your bank on the schedule you control in your Stripe Dashboard
• Clear responsibilities — you set prices, decide refund requests and respond to card disputes; Find a Ski School provides the checkout, records the booking, and issues the refunds you approve on your account

Setting up your Stripe account

If the Payments tab says Stripe set-up is paused, it is not open yet; follow the status shown and contact support if you need more information; a reopening date is not guaranteed.

1. From your school dashboard, go to Money → Payments
2. Accept the Find a Ski School Terms of Service for taking card payments, on behalf of your school
3. Tap Connect Stripe
4. You're redirected to Stripe's hosted onboarding, which creates a new Stripe account in your school's name
5. Provide the business, identity and bank details Stripe asks for
6. Return to Find a Ski School — the Payments tab shows the account and what Stripe still needs, if anything

The account Stripe creates is yours. It has its own Stripe login and its own full Stripe Dashboard, where you see every payment, refund, dispute and payout, and Open Stripe Dashboard in the Payments tab takes you straight there. You cannot link a Stripe account you already use — set-up always creates a new one — although if you are signed in to an existing Stripe account, Stripe may offer to reuse its business details so you do not retype them. Allow 5 to 10 minutes.

What happens at booking

• The student pays by card through Stripe Checkout
• The payment is a charge on your own Stripe account, and the card statement shows the name set in that account
• The applicable Find a Ski School commission is collected from that charge as a Stripe application fee — 5% on Starter (1% on rebookings), 2% on paid plans (0% on rebookings; 0% during the paid-plan first-year offer)
• The rest of the payment stays in your Stripe balance
• Stripe charges its processing fee to your Stripe account. It is never added to the learner's total, so any figure quoted after our commission is before Stripe's fees
• You receive a booking confirmation and the booking appears in your dashboard

Refunds

You decide refund requests under your published cancellation policy and approve them from the booking record. Find a Ski School then issues the refund on your own Stripe account, back to the learner's original card, and returns its commission on that payment in proportion to the amount refunded.

The refund is paid from your Stripe balance, so Stripe holds it as pending if that balance does not yet cover it, and may fail it if the balance is not funded. If that happens, refund the payment yourself in your Stripe Dashboard: we record that refund against the booking and return our commission in the same way.

Paid plan extras

On a paid plan you also get:

• Deposits — take a portion at booking, the rest at lesson date or in person
• Pay-later / request only — no card amount is taken at submission; check the recorded request status and agree the payment arrangements with the learner
• Offline payments — record bookings settled in cash or by other means. Commission is calculated on the amount processed through the platform, so a booking settled entirely offline carries no Find a Ski School commission; where a deposit is paid online and the balance is settled with you directly, commission applies to the deposit only

See how to set up deposits and pay-later.

If a student disputes a payment

Stripe decides chargebacks. Because the payment was a charge on your own Stripe account, the dispute is raised against that account: the disputed amount and Stripe's dispute fee are taken from your Stripe balance, and you respond to the dispute in your own Stripe Dashboard before the deadline Stripe sets. Find a Ski School tells you when a dispute opens and can give you the booking records you may want as evidence — lesson date, instructor, the policy the learner accepted, and the messages on the booking — but it submits nothing to the card network on your behalf. If a dispute is lost, Find a Ski School returns its commission on that payment in full.