WooPayments: Our Policies

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This page is an overview of the various policies we have, what information we collect from merchants, what types of businesses are allowed, and other such details.

By clicking the “Finish setup” button in WooPayments, you agree to the Terms of Service. Please see that document for our full terms. The remainder of the content on this page details other policies and procedures you may be interested in.

There are a few businesses and products that are restricted or prohibited from using WooPayments. Please see that list if you suspect that your store or products may not be allowed.

Some common examples:

• Can I sell CBD and other hemp-derived products with WooPayments?
• Can I sell alcohol with WooPayments?

WooPayments requires a WordPress.com account to connect your site to the WooPayments server. You will be asked to connect to a WordPress.com account during the signup process, or you can create a new one if you don’t have one already.

The WordPress.com account is used to ensure that requests from your site (e.g., payments, refunds, etc.) are securely and correctly attributed to your store.

The Jetpack plugin is not required to use WooPayments. WooPayments does connect your site with WordPress.com as described above, but the Jetpack plugin itself is not necessary to make this connection.

That said, Jetpack can be installed alongside WooPayments to add additional security, performance, and marketing tools to your site. It will use the same WordPress.com connection as WooPayments, so there’s no need to connect it separately.

Because the payments sector is heavily regulated, we must gather certain information from you before you’ll be able to use WooPayments. For example, during the signup process you may be asked for the following:

In the payments industry, this process is called “know your customer” or just “KYC.” Please consult our Know Your Customer FAQ for answers to further questions.

On rare occasions, card payments and/or payouts may be restricted on your account. This can happen for a variety of reasons:

• Your account is missing important information and the deadline to provide it has passed.
• Dispute activity has increased substantially—beyond reasonable thresholds.
• Our payments partner, Stripe, has found other issues with your account.

If your account is restricted, you should receive an email with information about the issue(s) from either the WooCommerce team or Stripe. Please respond to this email to address the issue.

In rare cases, we may also request verification of your identity through Validation.com. If this applies to you, we will send a separate email with instructions on how to verify.

If your account is restricted, but you did not receive an email, please contact support.

Because WooPayments is built in partnership with Stripe, they make the final determination on whether or not to temporarily withhold some (or all) of your payouts based on perceived risk factors. This is called a “reserve.”

Please see our Reserves guide for more information.

WooPayments offers in-person payments via a physical card reader. Should you need to return a card reader to us, please consult our card reader return policy.

WooPayments is PCI compliant, but merchants should still be aware of the core PCI-DSS requirements. For more general information, please see our PCI-DSS Compliance and WooCommerce documentation.