How to register a Stripe payment gateway account

Business today is global, and most transactions and purchases can be done online. Online payment gateways exist to support them. There are many gateways on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, so which one you add to your website depends on the nature of your business. In this article, MONA Media introduces one of the most widely used online payment gateways today: the Stripe payment gateway.

About the Stripe payment gateway

What is the Stripe payment gateway?

Stripe is a payment gateway from the United States, widely seen as a convenient way to take online payments for e-commerce websites, e-commerce websites thanks to its many features. Stripe handles hundreds of billions of USD a year for businesses around the world and processes a huge number of transactions every day from many countries. It is available in 26 countries but not in Vietnam. So Vietnamese businesses that work across borders and want to add Stripe need to find a way around this to make paying easy for international clients.

Stripe's policies and payment functions are similar to PayPal's. It accepts several card types, including MasterCard and Visa. Because the program is not yet supported in Vietnam, local domestic cards cannot be accepted. Stripe's strength is that it fills in gaps PayPal often has, such as sudden policy changes that sometimes hurt users.

On the technical side, Stripe provides SDKs that run well on the two most popular platforms, iOS and Android . It also offers APIs that can be used from many languages, including Java, Ruby, Python and Go.

You may also be interested in:

• Adding Visa payments to your website
• Overview of online payment methods

Features of the Stripe payment gateway

Here are the main Stripe features that support payments on your business's website . The first is Payment. Unlike PayPal and 2Checkout, Stripe sends customers straight to entering their card details, which is faster and more convenient than those two. Customers can pay on a desktop website or on mobile. Domestic cards, international cards and e-wallets are all accepted and kept secure. Every currency is accepted and converted to your default currency, which removes a few steps for the user.

The next feature is Connect. It is a toolkit that converts currencies automatically and lets other devices and platforms plug in to support your business. Payments are automated and international sellers are identity-verified, so you can manage transaction data more tightly.

Atlas helps international businesses connect with US banks and companies, which makes it easier to open an account in the US. It also provides legal guidance so international companies can join the US startup network.

The last two features are Radar and Relay. Radar helps prevent fraud in e-commerce, keeping transactions safe and blocking credit card fraud. Relay lets you build a product catalogue on mobile devices and handles order information across all platforms and channels so sellers can create orders easily.

Requirements to register for Stripe

To add the Stripe payment gateway to your online store, you need to meet certain legal and policy requirements. These are the things you need in place when you register for Stripe.

EIN

An EIN is a federal tax ID. A company needs one once it is formed and wants to operate with US businesses and banks.

To get an EIN you have to contact the US tax authority (IRS) for an application. The procedure and paperwork are fairly complicated, so it is best to get advice from a qualified lawyer to make sure it is done correctly.

Passport verification

Next, you need a passport to open a Stripe business account. Stripe currently only accepts a passport as proof of the business owner's identity. Other documents are not valid.

Register a business in the US

You also need to register a business in the US, which also makes it easier to get an EIN. You can use a service that registers a company or provides a US business address for you, so you do not need to travel to the US to do the paperwork. Some services set up US companies online. You still need to understand what they do and work closely with them. For goods, shipping forwarders and warehouses in the US are also expanding in Vietnam. Look into these services to make running the business smoother.

Other details and a US bank

You also need a US address and phone number for the business. This lets your company communicate and work with the US tax authority and register for other services in the country.

For banking, you need an account at a US bank. Since Stripe is not available in Vietnam, you need an intermediary to connect to US banks. The most common one is Payoneer, which lets you quickly get a US bank account and start transacting.

Or, once you have an EIN, you can use that tax ID to open a bank account directly. The legal side and paperwork would be a big challenge, though.

How to register for Stripe

Here is how to register a Stripe account and add Stripe to your online store.

Registering is simple once you have the requirements above. First go to Stripe.com and choose Start now to start registering.

Then fill in the form with the business owner's name, email and phone number. In the Country (country) field choose United States and finally click Create Account (create account). Stripe will send you a confirmation email. Confirm it and you can start using the account.

The site then takes you to a new screen. Choose Add business details to activate your account (add business details to activate your account) and click Start now. You will reach a more detailed form, so fill in everything it asks for. At the Type of business section, choose Individual then select Next and follow the steps after that.

Enter the information the site asks for, such as:

• Date of birth: Enter the month first, then the day.
• Home Adress: The address is saved automatically from the previous step.
• Social Security number (Social Security number): enter the EIN you prepared, or an SSN.

Next, your store information , following the site's instructions to verify a few things. After that you design the statement descriptor shown to customers. It is used on all your customers' transactions.

• Industry: Choose your business category
• Business website: enter your website's domain
• Product description: A short description of your store (in English)

Finally, link a bank account. For Vietnam, that means linking a bank account opened in the US, or one reached through Payoneer.

Select Submit all the information once it has been verified with two-step verification for security. That completes your Stripe registration.

Stripe is one piece of the payment setup. The other piece is an online store that takes international payments built properly from the start, with checkout, exchange rates and invoicing sorted, so money from overseas customers reaches your Vietnamese account without friction.

Stripe does not yet accept businesses registered in Vietnam (checked 19/09/2026)

Open the list of supported countries on Stripe's homepage and you will find Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, but no Vietnam. When we checked again on 19/09/2026, Stripe was still telling businesses outside its supported regions to consider Stripe Atlas or Stripe Treasury with stablecoins. In practice, that is a polite no to the Vietnamese market.

Many business owners take a detour through Stripe Atlas, paying to set up a real company in Delaware, USA, so they have a legal entity Stripe will accept. The ongoing cost is high. On top of the large setup fee, you pay US corporate tax every year and hire a US accountant to file financial reports. The biggest problem is that all your sales revenue has to be withdrawn to a foreign bank account. It cannot go straight to an ACB or Vietcombank account in Vietnam, and that extra step brings more paperwork.

Then there are the transaction fees on every order. Stripe's pricing page lists 2.9% plus 30 cents for each domestic US card payment. If the customer's card was issued outside the US, you pay another 1.5%. If the payment needs currency conversion, another 1% is taken. So when a customer in Vietnam buys clothes from a Vietnamese store and pays with a Visa card through this gateway, you take all three fees, and together they can wipe out the profit on the item. For every 100,000 VND you sell, a few thousand VND disappears into payment fees.

We build sales software for many clients, and we are used to shop owners who get a shock at month-end when they add up what they lost. Our advice is clear. Set up a US company and pay US tax only if most of your customers are in Europe or the US. If your customers are mostly in Vietnam, do not touch Stripe.

For Vietnamese customers paying you, we collect with MONA Pay

We needed a way to receive customer bank transfers automatically when selling courses on the MONA Academy homepage. Our staff could not reconcile every invoice by hand, and connecting to bank APIs often dropped events on older systems. So we built our own independent payment-notification system for internal use, collecting money straight into the company's ACB account. In 2026 we packaged that system and opened it to the public as MONA Pay. Many clients now use it and are surprised by how stable it is.

The biggest difference is that your customers' money goes straight into the bank account in your name. Our integrate online payment into your website system only reads the transaction notification and signals your software to mark the invoice as paid. We never hold your money or touch your cash flow. Linking an account is very safe: it only needs two OTP codes from ACB sent to the account holder's phone, and we do not keep your bank password. The money stays in your own account.

500 notifications free. Every month you get 500 transactions at no cost with every feature, including HMAC-signed webhooks that prevent forgery and an AI agent that reads blurry receipts. If your site grows, paid plans are still priced per transaction, for example 99,000 VND for 2,000 transactions or 299,000 VND for 10,000. The fee is fixed. We take no percentage of the amount customers transfer, and withdrawals and resent webhooks are free.

A comparison of international gateway fees shows PayPal costs up to 4.40% plus a fixed fee, and takes another 60,000 VND each time you withdraw to Vietnam. The best setup is to use both systems side by side. Use integrate PayPal into the website to receive foreign currency from overseas customers, and use MONA Pay for any customer in Vietnam who pays by domestic bank transfer. Do not hand your Vietnamese revenue to a foreign gateway.

Conclusion

Registering for and using the Stripe payment gateway is still fairly difficult for businesses in Vietnam. But it remains a popular gateway when your business operates internationally, especially when your business partners mostly use it. So Stripe is not something to ignore. It is worth working out how to use it to open more opportunities for your business.

If you sell in Vietnam and only collect bank transfers, you do not need Stripe: Automatic bank API notifications from MONA Pay notifies you the moment money lands in your bank account. 500 transactions a month are free, and we use it ourselves for MONA's own software before opening it to clients.

Updated 2026: Stripe is not open to Vietnamese entities. Here are the other options