Connecting Stripe
Connecting Stripe
To sell paid tickets, you need a way to collect money. Sunfish Events handles payments through Stripe, a trusted payment provider used by millions of businesses. Connecting Stripe lets you accept cards securely and get paid directly.
Running a free event? You don't need Stripe at all. You can skip this step and come back later if you ever decide to charge for tickets.
Why Stripe
When someone pays for a ticket, the money flows through Stripe into your own Stripe account, and payouts go straight to your bank. Sunfish never holds your money. Stripe also handles the security and compliance work of processing cards, so you don't have to.
(Screenshot: the payment setup page with a Connect button)
Connecting your account
From your organization's payment settings, start the connection process. You'll be guided through Stripe's onboarding, where you confirm a few details about your organization and add the bank account where you want to receive payouts.
If you already have a Stripe account, you can connect it. If you don't, you can create one during onboarding, it only takes a few minutes.
Have your business details and bank information handy before you begin. It makes the onboarding go quickly.
Test mode and live mode
Stripe has two modes. Test mode lets you try the whole payment flow using pretend card numbers, so you can see exactly what your attendees experience without moving real money. Live mode is the real thing, real cards, real payouts.
Use test mode while you're setting things up, then switch to live before you open registration to the public.
The platform fee
Sunfish adds a small platform fee to each paid order to keep the service running. It's a modest per-order amount, applied only when money changes hands, free events never incur a fee. Your current fee is shown in your payment settings.
With payments connected, you're ready to build your first event. See Creating Your First Event.