Guides

Stripe: Best Practices and Fraud Mitigation

Stripe is the payment processor that Locally uses to capture payments from online shoppers and deposit those payments to your bank account. If your store is participating in Buy It Locally online payment orders or orders for Same-Day Delivery, you must have a Stripe account connected to Locally.

Set up and link your Stripe account to Locally

Load your Buy It Locally Setup & Configuration panel and jump to Step 5 and proceed to setup a Stripe account.

  • To create a new account, follow along the instructions to create the account. It will automatically link to Locally upon completion
  • To link an existing Stripe account, click the "sign in" button at the top right of the Stripe wizard to sign in. This will link your existing Stripe account to Locally

**If you have multiple stores and will be selling higher priced merchandise on Locally (car racks, bicycles, boats, or similar),**you may find it useful to go through Stripe's sales channel and be guided through setup by a Stripe representative. This is not required, but can help. To do so:

  • Go to the Stripe contact page
  • Complete the form. In "Anything Else?" copy/paste in the following: "We are setting up a Stripe account to go live as a Connect account on the Locally platform. Their Stripe account name is "Locally Platform" and the Account ID is acct_172VwgAAKdQR3wIt."

Restricted Businesses

If your store sells firearms, ammunition or any of Stripe's restricted product types, you may be ineligible to hold a Stripe account and therefore unable to offer payments for pickup or delivery on Locally even if those restricted brands or products aren't on Locally. Please review Stripe's policies if you have questions. If this affects you, you can offer Reservations for In-Store Purchases which are available to any retailer.

Stripe Best Practices

While fraud against retailers on the Locally platform is exceedingly rare, accepting online payments always includes a degree of risk. Fraud screening is the responsibility of the participating retailer. Please educate yourself on recommended fraud protection best practices and the tools available from Stripe, the payment processor you use to process all Locally payments. Locally cannot accept responsibility for losses due to fraudulent charges.

Shopper Protocol

On orders for store pickup, Locally recommends you check the ID and credit card of the shopper at pickup to confirm their identity. The shopper's name, credit card type, and credit card last four digits are available on every Locally order screen. The shopper is reminded to bring their ID/credit card during pickup in the order email notification they receive from Locally when their order is confirmed.

On orders for same-day delivery, you have the option to require a signature at drop-off, or require the shopper show the courier their ID. If you have selected these options, we recommend you remind shoppers of these requirements in your order messaging so they are ready to be present or show their ID. If you want to do additional screening before releasing merchandise for delivery, we advise verifying the phone number (by calling) and/or using public directories to verify information about the order & shopper.

Fraud Protection with Stripe

To accept payments on Locally, you use Stripe. Fraud protection is incorporated into every online payment processed by Stripe. Every Stripe merchant account includes Stripe Radar, which is Stripe's default fraud protection product.

Stripe Radar automatically assigns a risk assessment score of 1-100 on every attempted payment. If the score is below a 75, Stripe will block the attempt and the shopper will not be able to complete their Locally checkout. Because the order is blocked, you aren't alerted if this occurs, but you can view any "blocked" attempts in the "Payments" section of your Stripe dashboard.

Any retailer who wishes to have more advanced options to fine-tune the fraud protection services offered by Stripe can activateStripe's "Radar for Fraud Teams" add-on, for a price of 2 cents per transaction.

Whatever settings you enable on Stripe's "Radar for Fraud Teams" will automatically be applied to the Locally cart. You can activate this at any time via your Stripe dashboard.

Handling Disputes

While exceedingly rare, if a shopper initiates a formal dispute against you, you'll work with Stripe and their guided dispute resolution process within your Stripe dashboard (https://dashboard.stripe.com/disputes). Locally is not involved with the dispute process.

If you have any questions on fraud protection, disputes, and more, please contact stripe at https://support.stripe.com/contact.

Get acquainted with the Stripe dashboard

You'll handle most, if not all, order related issues from your Locally order screens. All updates made on Locally order screens sync to Stripe automatically. However, Stripe contains detailed order information, payout details, and more, so we recommend having it bookmarked for easy access:

Manage your Stripe balance

To ensure prompt refunds to shoppers, you may want to keep some funds in your Stripe account. If you refund a shopper but your Stripe balance is too low, the refund will take longer than normal as Stripe will need to debit your bank account to obtain the funds before issuing the refund to the shopper.

To manage this, you have several options:

  • You can directly add funds to your Stripe account as-needed. This fund will be used for all refunds, not just refunds that exceed your Stripe balance. When the fund is depleted, your Stripe balance will be used for refunds. Learn how to set this up here: https://stripe.com/docs/add-funds
  • You can also rely on auto-debits from your connected bank account to cover pending balances if your balance goes negative, but this may cause a delay in the refund and make it more likely that a shopper will issue a chargeback. More info about auto-debits can be found here: https://support.stripe.com/questions/auto-debit-faq
  • You can turn off Stripe's auto-deposit feature and only manually pay out a portion of your balance, leaving the rest of your balance in reserve against refunds. To do this, select "Manual Payouts" in your Stripe dashboard here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/payouts. There's more information on manual payouts here: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts#manual-payouts

Customer Statement FAQs

Customers may notice that the order charge on their statement is shown as "recurring" on their bank statement. This is expected within Stripe even though the order charge is non-recurring. Learn more here. https://support.stripe.com/questions/non-recurring-charges-show-as-recurring-on-customer-bank-statements