Why Your Site Stopped Accepting Card Payments (and How to Turn It Back On)
If your site stopped accepting card payments from all your customers, Stripe paused your account and is waiting on something, almost always a piece of information from you. You reactivate it by filling out the form that appears in your dashboard.
Lorena makes soy candles in San Miguel de Allende and sells them through her site all over Mexico. On a normal month, she gets an order almost every day. In September, her site stopped accepting card payments, and it took her eleven days to find out.
At first she figured it was payday timing. Then she thought candles just sell in December, not September. On day eleven, a customer from Monterrey messaged her on WhatsApp: “I tried to pay three times and keep getting an error.” It wasn’t her card. The site wasn’t passing anyone’s card through at all.
If this is happening to you, it’s almost never something broken. It’s something pending, and it gets fixed from your dashboard.
Why did your site stop accepting card payments?
If a card fails for one customer, it’s their card. If it fails for everyone, it’s your account: the account that processes your card payments is paused, and as long as it stays that way, your site can’t open the payment screen for anyone.
The one moving that money is Stripe, and it flags an account in that state as restricted. A restricted account is still your payments account, with all your orders and history intact, but it won’t accept card payments until whatever’s pending gets resolved. Almost always, what’s pending is a piece of information from you.
Why would they ask you for something if you were already selling? Because verification doesn’t end the day you sign up. A payment processor has to know who it’s paying, and sometimes it asks for a new piece of information months later. Those requests come with a deadline, and if it passes without a response, payments get paused.
What does your customer see when they try to pay?
They see your site as always. They pick their candles, fill in their details, click Pay, and instead of the screen to enter their card, they get an error message.
That’s all they see. The customer from Monterrey wrote in because she’d bought from Lorena before and wanted her candles. Most people don’t write in: they close the tab and buy somewhere else. That’s why Lorena counted eleven days at zero and only one message.
And you don’t notice, because you never buy from your own site. From your side, everything looks perfect.
Where does your dashboard warn you?
In two places, one before the pause and one after. Don’t count on getting an email: the alert lives in your dashboard, and you have to open it yourself.
Before: in Settings, above your account details, Stripe shows you what it has pending with you, if anything. That’s where the missing piece of information shows up while you still have time.
After: in Orders a red alert appears saying “Your store can’t accept payments yet,” with a Set up payments button. And if you open Payments or Settings, instead of your usual lists you’ll see “Stripe needs more information” with the form right below it.
That’s the trap. Lorena didn’t open her dashboard for eleven days because there were no orders to check. The problem itself took away the one reason she had to open the screen where the alert was waiting.
How do you turn card payments back on?
By filling out what Stripe asks for in that form, without leaving your dashboard. There’s no other site to log into, no other password to remember.
When you’re done, above the form is a Review now button. It asks Stripe right then how your account is doing, and you get one of three answers:
- “You’re all set: your account can now accept payments.” Your lists come back and your site starts charging cards again.
- “Stripe still needs information from you.” Something in the form was left incomplete; go through it again from top to bottom.
- “Stripe is still reviewing your account.” You’ve done your part, and now it’s Stripe’s turn. There’s nothing left to submit.
You don’t have to keep checking either. Your site checks your account status again every hour, on its own, so the moment Stripe approves you, payments come back even if you’re not watching. The button just saves you the wait.
Can you keep selling in the meantime?
Yes, if you have another payment method turned on. The pause only affects cards. Bank transfer or cash with your own instructions, Mercado Pago, and PayPal don’t run through your Stripe account, so they keep working.
Lorena only had cards. With bank transfer turned on, those eleven days would have meant selling a bit less, not selling nothing.
You turn that on in Payment Methods, and it’s worth doing today, while you don’t need it. The day your account gets paused is not the day you want to start writing payment instructions.
The habit that warns you before your customers do
Work out the longest stretch you’ve ever gone without an order in your worst normal month. That’s your number.
If you ever go past it, before blaming the season, payday timing, or the weather, open your dashboard. It takes a minute, and it’s a way to find out about a paused account that doesn’t depend on a customer having the patience to message you.
For Lorena, her number would have sounded the alarm on day four, not day eleven.
Describe it, and the payments already come built in
If you don’t yet accept payments through your own site, the dashboard with these alerts doesn’t get bolted on separately: it comes with it. You describe it in one line, the way Lorena would:
“I want a site to sell my handmade soy candles from San Miguel de Allende, with a catalog by scent and size, shipping all over Mexico, and card or bank transfer payment.”
Out comes your published site, with its link, and the dashboard where you see your orders and payments. You can try it at proyecta.dev.
And if you already accept card payments, open Settings today and read what’s at the top. If there’s nothing there, great: now you know where to look next time.