Create and prefill the connected account
Create connected accounts for your marketplace.
A connected account is a Stripe account that belongs to one of your users (such as a seller, service provider or vendor). Connected accounts enable your marketplace to accept payments and manage funds on behalf of your users while maintaining separate financial records for each seller. As a marketplace, you must create connected accounts for each seller or service provider in your marketplace to facilitate payments, handle payouts and ensure proper compliance and reporting. This separation allows each connected account to have their own transaction history, business information and payout schedule, while giving your marketplace the ability to charge application fees and manage the overall payment flow. End customers see your marketplace’s name on receipts after making a purchase, rather than the name of the seller or service provider.
This guide shows you how to create a connected account and prefill the relevant fields.
Before you begin
Follow the interactive platform guide to set up your Stripe marketplace account.
Create a connected account
Use the Accounts v1 API to create a connected account by specifying the connected account properties. As a marketplace, your platform:
- Is usually the merchant of record, meaning you must use destination charges or separate charges and transfers
- Manages disputes and refunds
- Earns revenue by taking a cut from each transaction through application fees
These features impact the parameters you set when you create your connected accounts.
| Parameter | Value | Required? | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| controller.fees.payer | application | Yes | Your marketplace pays all Stripe fees, including payment processing fees. |
| controller.losses.payments | application | Yes | Your marketplace is responsible for negative balances and manages credit and fraud risk on the connected account. This requires you to review and acknowledge your responsibilities in the Dashboard. |
| controller.requirement_collection | stripe | Yes | Stripe is responsible for collecting updated information when requirements are due or change. |
| controller.stripe_dashboard.type | express | Yes | The connected account can access the Express Dashboard. |
The response includes the ID, which you use to reference the Account throughout your integration. After the request succeeds, the account exists in a pending state. Next, use the merchant information you already have to prefill the onboarding form.
Prefill merchant information
If you have information about the account holder (like their name, address or other details), you can streamline onboarding by providing this information when you create or update the account. The onboarding interface asks the account holder to confirm the prefilled information before accepting the Connect service agreement. The account holder can edit any prefilled information before they accept the service agreement, even if you provided the information using the Accounts API.
If you onboard a connected account and your platform provides it with a URL, prefill the account’s business_profile.url. If the business doesn’t have a URL, you can prefill its business_profile.product_description instead. Stripe also automatically detects and sets the connected account’s merchant category code (MCC) during onboarding, though you can set this property manually as well.
When testing your integration, prefill account information using test data to simulate different outcomes including identity verification and business information verification.
Next steps
After you prefill the merchant information, set up Dashboard access for the connected account.