Switching from WePay to Stripe

Key information and FAQs about the move from WePay to Stripe for your account

We are switching our payment processing from WePay to Stripe. MyStudio has been working closely with WePay and Stripe to securely migrate all saved bank transfers (ACH) and credit card data from WePay to Stripe. 

To ensure your payments do not become interrupted, please read the information and follow the directions below.

Table of contents:

Important details

Before WePay is disconnected from your MyStudio account, you will receive communications from our Customer Support team. Communications will be sent to the owner’s email address on file. Please make sure you have access to that email inbox.

Key points:

• Saved, non-expired bank transfers (ACH), credit cards, and recurring payments set before your specified transfer date on your email communications will be transferred over to Stripe
• Expired credit card data will not be transferred even though WePay may have successfully charged these cards in the past. Transferring to a new Stripe account will result in these expired credit cards being denied
• After your information has been transferred over to Stripe, clients’ experiences with paying will be the same with Stripe, with some enhancements (e.g. in-person card reader if you choose to start using one)
• Clients will need to re-enter payment information if using:
  • Expired cards
  • New saved bank transfers (ACH) and credit cards added after the specified transfer date on your email communications
  • Special "virtual cards" configured for single use or single vendors
• Your WePay account will be closed in late 2024 or early 2025 (exact date to be announced) after all payments have been settled. This will allow you time to continue refunding older payments from the MyStudio platform as needed.
• When switching from WePay to Stripe, your initial payout may be held for approximately 2 to 7 days within Stripe. After that, payouts will be daily occurrences.

 

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Permissions and accessibility

Staff access:

• Setup of Stripe MUST be done by the Studio/Business owner

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Stripe benefits

Stripe offers many benefits and opportunities for payments. In addition to keeping the same low processing fees for ACH and credit cards, with the transfer to Stripe you will also gain:

• A view of disputes directly integrated into the MyStudio platform
• A way to counter these disputes and view their status directly in the MyStudio platform
• The option to buy a Stripe card reader and connect it to the MyStudio point of sale
• Apple Pay and Google Pay through the card reader
• ACH connection for Canada

Stripe is also a PCI Level 1 Service Provider, meaning that your customers’ payment information is secure with the most rigid level of certification.

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Next steps

Completing your Stripe Know Your Customer (KYC) information

 

NOTE: Completing this Stripe setup is required by June 16, 2024! If you do not set up Stripe payouts, payments will be paused and you may lose all customer payment information.

 

Upon logging into your account, you will see a banner at the top of the page prompting you to take action for your account.

 

Clicking this banner will bring up more information about the Stripe migration.

On the pop-up, click “connect bank account for stripe payouts.” This will automatically redirect you to the Stripe setup.

NOTE: If you don’t see the banner at the top of your control panel, you can also access the Stripe setup page by going to payments > view Stripe payouts > click the pencil next to personal details.

Business information

The first step is to fill out your business information. This includes:

• Type of business: most of the time, this is selected as “company.”
• Business structure
• Legal business name: if you selected “individual” for the type of business, you do not have to fill out business details
  • Employer Identification Number (EIN): In the US, if you are a business with employees, you are required to have an EIN. If you are a sole proprietor or single LLC without employees, you can enter your SSN instead.
  • Doing business as: this is an optional field
• Registered business address

Personal details

Next, you must verify your identity and connection to the business. You will need to enter:

• Legal first and last name
• Email address: this is directly connected to the email address on file with MyStudio

• Job title

• Date of birth

• Home address
• SSN: if you labeled your type of business as an individual, you will be asked for your SSN
• Business owner: If you are a company representative and not a business owner, you will need to add the business owner’s information as well. Otherwise, if you are the business owner, you can “continue with no owners.”

Once completed, you will be redirected to a confirmation screen, and you can return to MyStudio.

Payout details (bank information)

When you return to MyStudio, you will have a popup that redirects you to payments > view stripe payouts. You will need to enter your payout details so that your earnings get deposited into your bank correctly.

Click “update” next to “payout details” then choose your payout method.

• Debit card: enter your debit card information
• Bank account (ACH): 
  • Bank routing number: if you are in Canada, the routing number is the transit number + branch number. This will look like 11000000 when typed, but you will see it formatted correctly as 11000-000 once added. 
• Bank account number
• Holder name
• Holder type

Ensuring Stripe KYC is correctly set up

If you chose “company” during the setup process, the MyStudio view Stripe payouts section will show personal details as “not applicable” and there will be a green checkmark next to both the business details and payout details.

If you chose “individual” during the setup process, the MyStudio view Stripe payouts section will show company details as “not applicable,” and a green checkmark will appear next to both the personal details and payout details. 

Once these are completed, you will be prepared to start processing payments via Stripe!

Transferring saved bank transfers (ACH) and credit card data

Starting June 16, 2024, we will start migrating the first large batch of WePay customers to Stripe. During this phase, your initial payment may be held for approximately 7 days within Stripe. We will send you an email with more information prior to your migration, but the transfer of tokenized data for ACH and credit card information is being handled on the back end between WePay and Stripe, so you do not need to do anything for this.

 

NOTE: The following payment information will not be transferred and will need to be re-added after:

• Expired credit cards
• ACH or credit cards entered after your transfer initiation date
• Special "virtual cards" configured for single use or single vendors

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Your WePay account after migration

Managing your WePay account

You will still be able to access your WePay account until late 2024 or early 2025 (the exact date will be announced).

We highly recommend downloading your payment reports and history from your WePay dashboard so that you maintain these records.

To do so, do the following:

1. Login to WePay and go to “account activity.”
2. In the “activity” box, click on the drop down to view “total sales,” “all activity,” or “deposited amount.”
3. Download the select views by clicking the down arrow icon at the top right of the box.

We also recommend continuing to check your WePay account for pending payments, open chargebacks, etc. Additionally, refunds will function the same through MyStudio until January 1, 2025.

Closing your WePay account

You will likely want to keep your WePay account open to handle transactions (e.g., refunding) that ran through WePay, but eventually, your WePay account will be closed. You may choose to close your WePay account proactively or wait for WePay to automatically close your account at the end of 2024/early 2025.

Before you close your WePay account, ensure that there is no more activity in your WePay account by checking for the following:

• All processing payments have been marked as paid
• All payments in transit have been settled into your bank account
• There are no refunds in progress or all refunds have been completed
• There are no open chargebacks or all open chargeback disputes have been resolved

When your WePay account is ready to be closed, use the following steps:

• Log in to https://wepay.com/login 
• Click "Settings" on the left-hand side of your dashboard.
• Click the blue "Close Account" button at the bottom of the page.
• Enter your account password in the password box.
• Click the blue "Close Account" button once more.
• If you are unable to delete your payment account or have any questions or concerns, you may reach out to WePay Support using the link below (Mon-Fri 9:00AM - 9:00PM EST): https://support.wepay.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Otherwise, WePay will automatically terminate your account for you in late 2024 or early 2025.

 

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FAQs

• Which email address will the email communications from MyStudio regarding the WePay to Stripe migration be sent to?
  • Email communications on when your information will be transferred over to Stripe will be sent to the owner’s email of your MyStudio account.
  • Email communications will be sent from info@mystudio.academy between now and July 2024. There may be instances where individual members of our team will be reaching out about your account, all coming from the @mystudio.academy email domain.
• How long does it take for payouts from Stripe to deposit into my account?
  • The very first deposit from Stripe may take 2-7 business days. After the initial deposit, the deposits will come each business day.
  • Please take this into consideration when planning finances when you receive the date your business will be switching over to Stripe.
• Can I still refund old payments from WePay?
  • Yes, you will still have access to refund payments within 180 days of the transactions from within MyStudio.
• Where will I be able to refund Stripe payments?
  • Refunds, chargebacks, disputes, etc. will all be available to you to manage directly in your MyStudio account, the Payments section. 
• Where can I buy a Stripe in-person card reader? 
  • You can learn how to purchase an in-person reader in our article here: Stripe Card Reader.
• Is there any difference in fees with Stripe? 
  • There is no change in fees when switching from WePay to Stripe. 
• Is there any change to the transfer frequency options?
  • Yes - Stripe is pre-configured for daily automatic payouts with 2 day payout speed. Payout speed refers to the amount of time it takes for your funds to become available. Daily automatic payout schedule with a 2 day payout speed, Stripe pays out funds daily from transactions captured 2 business days earlier. This is controlled at a platform level and cannot be changed at the business connected account level. 
• Is there a difference between ACH vs. Debit Cards when choosing the payout method?
  • No difference. Payouts are still daily automatic with 2 day payout speed. If you use a debit card, the maximum limit of $9,999.00. ACH does not have a limit. 
• What payout method should I select in Canada? KYC requires you to select a payout method, but Bank Account (ACH) is not available in Canada. The ACH information asks for the Bank routing number, which Canadian Bank accounts do not use.

  • ACH is equivalent to EFT in Canada. If you choose ACH, this will allow for EFT. 

    Regarding routing number in Canada - it is a combination of your transit number and financial institute number. This is an eight digit number in Canada (nine digit in the US). 

• For a full refund, will Stripe reimburse the admin/CC fees? 
  • Yes. Total payment along with fees are reversed with a refunded transaction. 
• How does in-person/Apple Pay/Google Pay work?

  • Currently the Stripe card reader does not process Apple and Google pay for our system.

• Can we still have the option of daily/weekly/monthly payouts? 
  •  Yes. The default is set to daily. If you’d like to change this to weekly or monthly you will need to contact MyStudio support team to have this changed. There is a 2 day payout speed for the US and 7 days for Canada and the UK. Stripe pays out funds daily from transactions captured 2 business days earlier. This is controlled at a platform level and cannot be changed at the business connected account level. 
• How do you restart the registration process if an owner accidentally choses "individual" rather than "company"? 

  • The owner would need to call/ live chat through to MyStudio support team to get this changed. 

• What do we do if there isn't a banner at the top of their MyStudio Account? 

  • If there is no banner at the top of the MyStudio account - then that generally means the stripe payment set up has already been initiated. Please navigate to the payments section > View Stripe payouts > Account personal and business details as well as Payout account details to edit and complete as needed. If you are not seeing the view stripe payout section in payments - please reach out to our live support for us to help troubleshoot. 

• I'm the owner and I've logged into MyStudio and when I click the Stripe KYC banner at the top of the screen, I'm getting a message - "Please login to MyStudio account with the owner's credentials to continue." What do I do? 
  
  
  • You need to use the email address that your MyStudio account was setup with. To find this email address, go to: Settings > Business Profile - Studio email. Here is a video to show you how to find this email address. 
• I received an email from WePay saying that I have negative funds in my WePay account. What does this mean?
  • Accounts will go into the negative if a refund has been processed from a payment that was processed when we were on WePay. If your WePay account is in the negative, it will pull money from the bank account they have connected. It is recommended that you keep your WePay accounts active if you need to process a refund for any payments that were taken prior to the Stripe migration. WePay will support an API with us directly until 31 Dec 2024. After this date, if you need to process a refund for a payment that was processed prior to migrating to Stripe, you will need to process the refund through your WePay dashboard directly, not through MyStudio.

 

Need help or have more questions? Please reach out to our support team directly.