Getting paid

Somewhere in setting up your shop, a company you’ve never dealt with asks for your banking details and a photo of your licence. That’s Stripe, and the question people actually want answered is whether it’s safe and where the money ends up. Short version: the money goes straight to you, and it never passes through us.

What Stripe is

Stripe is the company that handles card payments. When someone buys from your shop, Stripe takes the card details on a secure page, checks the card, and moves the money into your bank account. They do this for a very large number of businesses, which is the point: card payments come with rules and fraud and chargebacks, and none of that is work you should be doing at your kitchen table.

The important bit is whose account it is. You get your own Stripe account, in your own name. Buyers pay you, not us. That means you’re the one on the receipt, refunds come out of your account and are yours to give, and if a card is disputed you deal with it as the business that made the sale. We can’t hold your money, spend it, or hold it back, because it is never in our hands to begin with.

What Stripe will ask you for

Stripe has to confirm you’re a real person running a real business. They call it verification and it is the same set of questions a bank would ask. Expect: your name, date of birth and address, some basic detail about the business, and the bank account you want the money to land in. If they can’t confirm you automatically, they ask you to upload a government-issued photo ID and something showing your home address.

Have your banking information nearby before you start. A void cheque covers it. It takes most people something like fifteen minutes.

You can stop partway and come back. Nothing is lost, and your shop keeps everything you’ve built while you sort it out. If Stripe still wants something from you, it shows up as a note in your dashboard rather than silently failing.

We don’t see your ID, and we never see a card number. That part of the conversation is between you and Stripe.

When the money actually arrives

Not instantly, and this catches people out, so it’s worth knowing before your first sale rather than after it.

Your first payout is the slow one. Stripe says that after your first live payment they typically schedule that first payout to complete within seven to fourteen days, and that it can take longer depending on the kind of business you are. This is a one-time thing while they get comfortable.

After that it settles into a rhythm. For Canadian accounts Stripe’s published settlement timing is three business days, so money from a sale today generally reaches your bank a few working days later. Weekends and holidays push it along, as they do with everything else in banking.

So: a sale on Saturday is not money on Saturday. Plan the first fortnight knowing that, and don’t promise yourself a payout that hasn’t cleared.

The fees, plainly

Stripe charges a percentage of each sale plus a small flat amount per transaction, with a bit more on cards issued outside Canada. We’re deliberately not printing the numbers here, because they’re Stripe’s to change and a guide that quotes them will eventually be lying to you. The current rates are on Stripe’s Canadian pricing page, and what you actually paid is itemised in your own Stripe dashboard after every sale.

What matters is that we add nothing to it. Stripe’s fee goes to Stripe. We take no percentage of your sales, no per-order fee, and no cut of the processing. We never take a cut. That isn’t a promotion or a current arrangement, it’s the whole business model, and you can check it against your Stripe statements any month you like.

Bluenose costs $100 a month, flat. Stripe, for their part, say they don’t charge “setup fees, monthly fees, or any other hidden fees like closure fees.”

When billing starts

Not at signup. Building your shop is free and there’s no clock running while you do it. You can take a month over it if that’s what your winter looks like.

When you’re ready you press Publish, which is where you enter a card. Nothing is charged at that moment. We look over every new shop before it opens, and the subscription’s first charge happens when your shop actually goes live and the public can reach it. You are never paying for a shop nobody can visit.

Tax

We’re not going to give you tax advice, and you should be wary of any platform that does.

What we can do is point you at the right doors. The CRA explains business numbers and program accounts, and separately when you have to register for and start charging GST/HST. Both pages are the actual authority, kept current by the people who enforce it.

Then talk to a bookkeeper. An hour with someone local, once, near the beginning, is one of the better hundred dollars a small business spends. They’ll tell you which of the above applies to you, which is a different question from what the rules say, and it’s the question you actually have.