Create and prefill the connected account

Create connected accounts for your marketplace.

A connected account is a Stripe account that belongs to one of your users (such as a seller, service provider, or vendor). Connected accounts enable your marketplace to accept payments and manage funds on behalf of your users while maintaining separate financial records for each seller. As a marketplace, you must create connected accounts for each seller or service provider in your marketplace to facilitate payments, handle payouts, and ensure proper compliance and reporting. This separation allows each connected account to have their own transaction history, business information, and payout schedule, while giving your marketplace the ability to charge application fees and manage the overall payment flow. End customers see your marketplace’s name on receipts after making a purchase, rather than the name of the seller or service provider.

This guide shows you how to create a connected account and prefill the relevant fields.

Before you begin

Follow the interactive platform guide to set up your Stripe marketplace account.

Create a connected account

Use the Accounts v2 API to create a connected account by specifying the connected account Dashboard and responsibilities. As a marketplace, your platform:

Is usually the merchant of record
Uses indirect charges
Manages disputes and refunds
Earns revenue by taking a cut from each transaction through application fees

These features impact the parameters you set when you create your connected accounts.

Assign account configurations

Connected accounts interact with your platform and Stripe based on which configurations you assign. Most marketplaces assign their connected accounts the recipient configuration. Some marketplaces also assign the merchant configuration.

The recipient configuration includes the stripe_balance.stripe_transfers capability, which allows the Stripe balance for the Account to receive Transfers from the platform’s balance. You must assign the stripe_balance.stripe_transfers capability to use indirect charges.

You also need to assign the merchant configuration to your connected accounts in the following cases:

You use direct charges . It’s rare for marketplaces to use this charge type.
You use indirect charges with the on_behalf_of parameter to set a connected account as the merchant of record .

Code sample

Command Line

Select a language

cURL

Stripe CLI

Ruby

Python

PHP

Java

Node.js

.NET

No results

Parameter	Value	Description
defaults.responsibilities.fees_collector	`application`	Your marketplace pays all Stripe fees, including payment processing fees.
defaults.responsibilities.losses_collector	`application`	Your marketplace is responsible for negative balances and manages credit and fraud risk on the connected account. This requires you to review and acknowledge your responsibilities in the Dashboard.
dashboard	`express`	The connected account can access the Express Dashboard.
configuration.recipient.capabilities	‘stripe_balance.stripe_transfers’	The connected account can receive funds from your marketplace.

The response includes the ID, which you use to reference the Account throughout your integration. After the request succeeds, the account exists in a pending state. Next, use the information you already have to prefill the onboarding form for the connected account.

Prefill account information

If you’ve already collected information for your connected accounts, you can prefill that information on the Account object. You can prefill any account information, including personal and business information, external account information, and so on.

After creating the Account, create a Person to represent the person responsible for opening the account, with relationship.representative set to true and any account information you want to prefill (for example, their first and last name).