Connect payments and billing
Outcomes
Two prices on every product
Getting paid runs on one relationship: you buy products from Vendasta at a wholesale price, and you sell them to your clients at the retail price you set. Every product has two prices, and the difference between them is your margin. Flip each one:
Each active product creates two matching subscriptions: a wholesale subscription from you to Vendasta, and a retail subscription from your client to you. You manage both from Partner Center.
Choose how you collect
Vendasta Payments lets a client pay an order or invoice with a card inside the platform, and pays that revenue out to your bank account. It runs on Stripe, and there are two ways to set it up:
Connect an existing account. Your Stripe account belongs to you: your transaction history, your reporting, and your negotiated Stripe rates stay yours wherever your business goes.Set up Stripe account. A new account created through the platform rather than under your own Stripe login. Approval typically takes one to two business days.
Processing runs at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per credit or debit card transaction, and 1 percent per direct debit transaction, whichever route you take.
Both collect the same payments; the difference is who holds the account. Decide before your first transaction, because connecting your own Stripe account stays available only until you process a payment through a platform-created one. A pattern many partners follow is connecting their own account and treating the fee as the price of portability. You can also skip in-platform collection entirely and bill clients through whatever system you already use.
Complete your billing contact first
Setup checks your billing details before it will let you apply, and an incomplete address is what produces the "Unsupported in Your Area" message. Two minutes here saves a confusing message later.
Labfill in your billing contact
Go to Administration → My billing.
Set up Vendasta Payments
Watch how Vendasta Payments works before you start the application:
The application is a Stripe identity check, so it goes fastest with your details in front of you: your legal business name exactly as it appears on your tax ID, your business number (EIN in the US, CRA business number in Canada), your operating name if you trade under a different one, your registered business address (a home address works if you do not have one), and the account representative's legal name, home address, and government ID.
Two things on that page are yours to set rather than Stripe's, and both are easy to miss. The Account statement description is how charges appear on your customers' statements: replace the default with your own business name. And Receiving bank account is an in-platform form asking for the country, currency, transit number, institution number, and account number your payouts land in, so have those details to hand.
This is the one part of setting up that is not a five-minute job, and it is not worth pretending otherwise: it runs across several Stripe screens, it asks for government ID, and approval typically takes one to two business days. Work through it with the Vendasta Payments guide open beside you, which covers every field in order.
Once you are approved, payments your clients make appear under Commerce → Payments. Stripe holds your first payments for up to a week, then pays out on a seven-day rolling basis into the account you just added. The full field-by-field detail is in the Vendasta Payments guide.
Set billing to collect on its own
Default billing settings decide what happens on every renewal, and they apply automatically to each new account you create. Set this once and collection is handled from then on.
Labturn on default billing automation
Go to Administration → Default billing settings.
The page carries a Memo field as well, which prints at the bottom of every invoice subscription billing creates. And one limit worth knowing, which the page states in a banner of its own: this applies to accounts created after you save. Accounts that already exist keep their current settings, and any single account can be switched from its own billing settings under Accounts → Manage Accounts. This guide covers the options.
Set your retail prices
Pricing is yours to control, and automation depends on it. Without a retail price on an edition, the automation has no amount to calculate, so this is not an optional polish step.
The Products screen shows your suggested retail price. Your wholesale cost lives elsewhere: Marketplace → Discover Products carries Your cost columns beside the vendor's suggested retail, which is where you check margin before you set a number.
Labprice one product
Go to Marketplace → Products.
One fact keeps your numbers clean: a catalog price change applies to new subscriptions from then on. Existing clients keep the price they signed up at unless you edit their subscription directly, and an edit takes effect on the next billing cycle. This guide covers subscription management.
Check what you owe each month
One tab answers "what am I on track to pay Vendasta this month?" It is an estimate, broken down per product rather than totalled in one number.
Labread your Estimated Usage
Go to Administration → My billing, then select the Estimated Usage tab.
Knowledge Check
Three quick questions on the two prices, the Stripe decision, and where the money shows up.