Clone customer payment information across connected accountsLegacy
Reuse payment information across multiple connected accounts that share customers.
Caution
The content of this page describes a legacy feature. Support for it might end without notice, so if you use this feature, update your integration to use the current process for reusing payment information across connected accounts. For more information, see Share payment methods across multiple accounts.
For some business models, it’s helpful to reuse your customers’ payment information across connected accounts. For example, a customer who makes a purchase from one of your connected sellers shouldn’t need to re-enter their credit card or bank account details to purchase from another seller.
With Connect, you can accomplish this by following three steps:
- Storing customers, with a payment method, on the platform account.
- Creating tokens to clone the payment method when it’s time to charge the customer on behalf of a connected account.
- Creating charges using the new tokens.
Storing customers
When not cloning payment methods, you save the Stripe Customer objects on each individual connected Stripe account. When cloning payment methods, you instead save them on the platform Stripe account.
This is an API call but be sure you use your own secret and publishable keys instead of the connect account’s.
Creating tokens
Caution
If your platform uses the Sources API, you must create a Source from that customer rather than creating a token. If your platform uses the Payment Methods API, you must create a PaymentMethod from that customer. After following either of these guides, proceed to Creating charges without creating a token.
When you’re ready to create a charge on a connected account using a customer saved on your platform account, create a new token for that purpose. You’ll need:
- The Stripe account ID of the connected account (for example,
acct_
) that you’re creating the charge for8wAo2hqqI4iD0pzM - The ID of the customer in your platform account (for example,
cus_
) being chargedlYk2B7NhUKOob0 - The card or bank account ID for that customer, if you want to charge a specific card or bank account rather than the default
Creating charges
With the token generated in the previous step, attach this token to a customer on the connected account.
Caution
Charges that are made on the cloned customer aren’t reflected on the original customer. This feature is intended for multiple connected accounts that need to charge the same user.
Caution
If your platform uses the Payment Methods API, you must pass the payment method ID as the payment_
parameter instead of passing the source
parameter.
Then, use the customer ID (for example, cus_
) and the payment method ID (for example, card_
) returned by the customers.
call to charge the customer.