Payments & Payouts

VendorStreet uses Stripe to move money. You connect a Stripe account once, and after that payments from vendors and guests flow to you automatically, minus the platform fee.

This page covers connecting your account, how the money actually moves, and — being straight with you — which parts of the payments story live inside VendorStreet and which happen in Stripe.

Do I need to connect Stripe?

If you want to take money through VendorStreet, yes.

It’s mandatory for experiences — every experience booking is a paid Stripe checkout, and guests will be blocked at payment if you haven’t connected. For markets, it’s what lets you collect booking payments from vendors.

Connect early. Stripe sometimes asks for verification documents that take a day or more to clear, and you don’t want to discover that the morning you planned to open bookings.

How do I connect my payout account?

Go to Settings → Organization and find the Payouts card — “Connect a Stripe account to receive vendor payments for your markets.” You’ll need an owner or admin role.

1. Click Connect payouts.
2. You’re redirected to Stripe’s hosted onboarding, where you enter your business details, tax information, and bank account. This is Stripe’s form, not VendorStreet’s — your banking details never pass through us.
3. Complete it and you’re returned to VendorStreet, where the card shows your status as Stripe has it now.

You don’t have to come back to the card for VendorStreet to notice. Stripe tells VendorStreet when your account changes, and taking an experience live or taking a payment checks with Stripe first if the last word was “not ready”. If the card still says something unexpected after you finish at Stripe, click Refresh status to read it again before assuming anything is broken. Stripe often needs a few minutes, sometimes a day, to verify what you entered.

If Stripe needs more from you, the button reads Resume onboarding instead, and picks up where you left off.

Navigation note: use Settings → Organization and scroll to Payouts. The /settings/payments URL exists but just redirects there.

What do the payout statuses mean?

The card shows one of three badges:

• Not connected — “You have not set up payouts yet. Connect with Stripe to start collecting booking payments.”
• Onboarding incomplete — “Stripe still needs more information before payouts can be enabled. Resume onboarding to finish, then refresh the status here.”
• Connected — you’re done. Both onboarding is complete and payouts are enabled.

Below the badge, two detail rows show Charges and Payouts as Enabled or Disabled:

• Charges: Enabled means you can take money from customers.
• Payouts: Enabled means Stripe will send that money to your bank.

These can differ. Stripe will sometimes let you charge before it’s satisfied enough to pay out, so watch for Charges: Enabled / Payouts: Disabled — you’re collecting money that’s sitting in Stripe until you finish verification.

If Stripe restricts your account later, for example switching charges off while it asks for more information, Stripe tells VendorStreet and your checkouts stop sending buyers to a payment that would fail: they’re told you can’t take online payments yet. Resolve it in your Stripe dashboard, and bookings open again as soon as Stripe re-enables charges. Refresh status reads the latest from Stripe on the spot whenever you want to check.

How does the money flow?

Payments go directly to your connected Stripe account, with the platform fee taken out at the point of charge. VendorStreet doesn’t hold your funds and doesn’t pay you out later — Stripe deposits into your bank on your Stripe payout schedule.

The platform fee is a flat per-booking amount, not a percentage: $1.00 per booking, set platform-wide. The fee is recorded on the invoice when it’s issued, and it can never exceed the invoice total.

The amount is the same for every organization and you can’t change it. What you can choose is who pays it — see the next section.

Depending on your arrangement, the fee is borne by the market, by the vendor, or split between you.

Experiences and venue seats. The $1 is paid either by you, out of your payout, or by your guest as a separate Booking fee line at checkout; which one is a setting on your account (Settings → Organization → Booking fee). When the guest pays it, your payout is the same as if the fee did not exist: Stripe collects the $1 with the rest of the charge and passes it straight to VendorStreet. The booking fee is VendorStreet’s, not your service fee, and it never counts as your revenue. See Checkout Charges.

If you’re on a flat-rate plan rather than per-booking, the per-booking fee is zeroed out and covered by your subscription instead. See Billing.

Who pays the $1 booking fee?

You decide. There are two options, and neither changes the amount:

• You absorb it. The fee comes out of your payout. Your customer pays your price and nothing more. This is the default.
• Your customer pays it. It’s added at checkout as a separate line, so the customer sees exactly what it is, and your payout isn’t touched.

For appointments, experiences and venue seats the choice is organization-wide. Go to Settings → Organization and find the Booking fee card: “VendorStreet charges $1 per booking. Who pays it?” Pick We absorb it or Our customers pay it. The change applies to bookings made from then on; bookings already paid keep what they were charged. If your clients pay it, the client FAQ already has wording that explains the fee to them.

For markets the choice is per market, because each market bills its vendors separately. Open the market’s overview (Dashboard in the sidebar): the Billing & booking fee card says who pays it today, and Change who pays switches it. If your vendors pay it, it appears on their booking invoice as a platform fee line; if you absorb it, it’s deducted from your payout and never shows on the invoice.

You need an owner or admin role to change either.

Refunds never return the fee, whoever paid it. When you refund a booking, the refund covers what went to you; the $1 stays with VendorStreet, including on a full refund.

When the card is read-only. You’ll see one of two reasons instead of the choice:

• “Your plan doesn’t carry a per-booking fee.” You’re on a flat plan, so there’s no per-booking fee to assign.
• “You’re on a negotiated rate — contact support to change it.” VendorStreet has set a special rate for your account or this market. Changing who pays would overwrite it, so the switch stays locked. Ask your VendorStreet contact.

Checkout charges & who’s the merchant of record

Consumer checkouts — experiences and venue seat sales — can carry more than the ticket price: an optional service fee, tipping, a card-processing surcharge, and sales tax. The full breakdown and setup is on its own page: Checkout Charges.

The part that belongs here is who settles the money. On these consumer sales you are the merchant of record. Concretely:

• Your name shows on the buyer’s card statement (not VendorStreet’s).
• You bear Stripe’s processing fee on the charge.
• You collect and remit sales tax. VendorStreet does not calculate, hold, or file it for you.

The VendorStreet platform fee is unchanged by any of this — it’s still the same flat per-booking amount, taken at the point of charge. And the platform charges you pay VendorStreet (membership, market activation — see Billing) are the opposite direction of money and are not affected: there, VendorStreet is billing you.

Sales tax needs a one-time Stripe setup

Sales tax is computed by Stripe Tax against your own tax registrations. Being straight with you: until you register your tax jurisdictions in Stripe, checkouts add $0.00 tax — even with tax switched on in VendorStreet. Register under Stripe dashboard → Settings → Tax → Registrations, one entry per state/province/country where you collect. Full detail is in Checkout Charges.

Where do I see my payouts?

In Stripe, not in VendorStreet. This is the honest limitation worth knowing up front.

The Payouts card in VendorStreet shows your connection status and nothing else — no payout list, no schedule, no balance, no amounts. For actual payout history, deposit dates, and balances, log in to your Stripe dashboard directly. There’s no shortcut link from VendorStreet, so bookmark Stripe separately.

Inside VendorStreet, use the reports for revenue by market and schedule, and Billing for what you owe the platform.

How do refunds work?

Experience bookings can be refunded. Guests cancel themselves within your cancellation window; you can use Cancel & refund on any paid booking at any time, or Refund… for part of it. The refund reverses the transfer to you by the amount refunded; the per-booking platform fee is not refunded. See Experiences.

Venue seat bookings work the same way: Refund on a booking reverses the transfer to you, and the per-booking platform fee stays with the platform. The one exception is a seat VendorStreet could not allocate after the guest paid — that refund is the platform’s own, and the fee goes back with it.

If your guests pay the booking fee, it goes back to them only when their whole booking is refunded: a full cancellation, a full seat refund, or a refund that takes everything left. Stripe’s refund reverses the transfer to you by the whole amount refunded, booking fee included, so VendorStreet refunds that $1 of its fee to your Stripe balance straight after. You end up exactly where you would be if the guest had never paid a booking fee. If that second step ever fails, the guest is still refunded and VendorStreet’s team is alerted to pay you the $1. A partial refund, or a cancellation where you keep a fee, leaves the booking fee with VendorStreet.

Appointment bookings are refunded when a client cancels (under your cancellation policy), and you can refund any amount of an appointment at any time with Refund…. The refund reverses the transfer to you by the amount refunded; the per-booking platform fee is not refunded, even on a full refund. See Appointments.

Market invoices cannot be refunded from within VendorStreet. There’s no refund action on an invoice — and attempting to void a paid one is refused with a message pointing at refunding instead. If you need to refund a vendor, issue the refund from your Stripe dashboard and reconcile it in your own records.

Plan for this if you run a market with a refund policy: the money movement is a manual Stripe operation today.

Can vendors pay their market invoices online?

Yes. An issued invoice shows a Pay now button in the vendor’s invoice view, which sends them to a Stripe-hosted checkout page — card details are entered on Stripe, never in VendorStreet. When the payment completes, the invoice flips to paid automatically. Vendors only see the button while the invoice is in the issued state; paid and void invoices don’t offer it.

If a vendor pays you outside the platform — cash at the market table, a mailed check — record it yourself: open the invoice from your admin invoices list and use Record payment. Note the method and any reference in the memo; the invoice is marked paid with an offline payment on its record, so your reports don’t care which channel the money took.

What about sales tax on booth fees?

If your jurisdiction requires you to collect sales tax on the booth or stall fee itself, you can have VendorStreet compute it on the invoice — it works identically whether the vendor pays by card or you record an offline payment. This is separate from the consumer-side checkout charges tax, and it’s off by default; invoices are byte-identical until you turn it on. Three switches control it:

1. Enable it per market and set the rate — in the market’s edit screen, alongside the other charge settings. The rate is a plain percentage you enter yourself (up to 20%); VendorStreet does not look rates up for you, so use the rate your jurisdiction actually requires.
2. Mark vendor types taxable or not — each vendor type carries a booth fee taxable flag (on by default). This is how you express rules like “farmers selling raw produce are exempt, food trucks are not.”
3. Exempt an individual vendor — on the market’s Vendors page, under Active vendors, any vendor can be marked booth-tax exempt, overriding their type. Use it for the vendor who shows you a valid exemption certificate.

When it’s on, qualifying invoices grow a Sales tax line the vendor sees itemized above the total. Tax is computed when the invoice is issued and doesn’t recompute afterwards.

Can I change a booking after it’s been invoiced?

Not the parts the invoice is priced from. Once a booking carries an invoice that isn’t void, its vendor type, capacity tier and assigned booths are locked, and editing one is refused with a message saying so. The invoice snapshots its line items and its tax the moment it’s issued and never recomputes them, so an edit after the fact would leave the invoice billing something the booking no longer is.

The way through depends on whether the money has moved:

• Invoice issued, not yet paid — void it, make the change, then issue a new invoice. Re-issuing prices the booking from scratch, tax included.
• Invoice already paid — a paid invoice can’t be voided (see refunds above). Refund or credit the vendor in Stripe first, then rebook.

Everything else about the booking — notes, add-ons, the vendor’s own details — is unaffected, and a booking with no invoice yet can be edited freely.

Common gotchas

• Connecting isn’t finishing. Stripe’s flow has to be complete, and Stripe has to verify it. The card shows what Stripe still needs.
• Charges can switch off later. If Stripe restricts your account, buyers can’t pay online until you resolve it in Stripe.
• Charges enabled ≠ payouts enabled. Check both rows.
• There is no payouts view in VendorStreet. Go to Stripe.
• No invoice refunds in-product. Handle those in Stripe.
• Venue seats now take real payment. There’s a full public paid seat checkout — browse, hold, pay through Stripe. The old “seats are inventory-only” behavior is gone. See Venues & Seating.
• You’re the merchant of record on consumer sales. For experiences and venue seats, your name is on the buyer’s statement and you owe the sales tax. See below.
• Only owners and admins can see or manage the Payouts card.

Next steps

• Checkout Charges — service fee, tips, surcharge, and sales tax
• Billing — platform charges, subscriptions, and activation
• Experiences — the guest checkout flow
• Pricing Rules — what vendors are charged
• Stripe Payment Terms — the payment processing terms