Connect your own payment account and sell from your site. Buyers pay you directly on your provider's checkout page. Archival takes no fee on sales and never holds your money.
Four steps. Connecting takes a few minutes once your site is on a plan that includes Payments.
Go to editor.archival.dev and create an account, or sign in to the one you have. Open the site you want to sell from, or build a new one.
Put the site on Pro or White Glove. Payments is included with both, at no extra charge.
Open the site's Settings, then Payments, and choose the provider your account is with: Stripe or Square. See what differs between them.
Your provider asks which account to connect. Approve access for the live account your site sells from. At Stripe, connect a sandbox the same way as your test account; at Square, Archival provides one. Payments is then on, and the editor's preview checks out in the test account.
Payments is included with Archival Pro ($15/mo) and White Glove ($150/mo). Archival takes no fee on sales. Your provider's own processing fees apply. See pricing.
In your site's settings, open Payments, choose your provider and connect two accounts: the live one your site sells from, and a test one the editor's preview checks out in. A connection is only used to read your catalog and to create and read checkouts.
You are the merchant of record. Disconnect from the same panel, or from your provider's dashboard, at any time.
The Payments panel in a site's settings in Archival, connected to a payment account, beside the provider's screen asking to approve what Archival may do in that account.
Products and prices are made at your payment provider, where you already manage them. Your site reads them to show what is for sale.
Change a price or take a product off sale there and your site picks it up within minutes, without a deploy.
Three products and their prices in a payment account's catalog, and the same three products with the same prices on a shop page of an Archival site, each with an Add to cart button.
When a buyer checks out, your site starts a checkout in your payment account and sends them to your provider's hosted payment page. They pay you directly, the money settles to your own account, and they come back to your site.
Sell one thing with a buy button, or add the cart script and let buyers collect several first.
A cart page on an Archival site with two items and a Checkout button, leading to the provider's hosted checkout, where the buyer pays the site's owner and is returned to the site's thanks page.
A site connects an account at Stripe or Square, and is built the same way on either. Checkout, your catalog and what Archival charges are the same. These are the differences.
| Stripe | Square | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscriptions | Sell recurring prices as subscriptions. | One-off sales only. |
| Stock tracking | No stock counts, so nothing sells out. | Counts come from your Square location, and what has sold out cannot be bought. |
| Shipping countries | Checkout takes addresses only in the countries you ship to. | Checkout asks for an address, in any country. |
| Backing out of checkout | The buyer returns to a page of your site that you choose. | The checkout page has no way back to your site. |
| Locations | One catalog for the whole account. | A site sells from one of your locations, which you choose. |
The full comparison is in the docs, with what each difference means for the site you build.
Buyers pay you directly. Payments settle to your own account at your provider, and Archival never holds your money.
Archival takes nothing from a sale. Payments is included with Pro and White Glove, and the only processing fees are your provider's.
What you sell lives in your payment account and your site reads it, so every price is entered once, in one place.
Your pages build to static HTML. Your site starts the checkout, from its cart or a small carrier, and your provider takes the card.
Build a site, put it on Pro, and connect your payment account from its settings.
Already on Archival? Open your site's Settings, then Payments. The docs have working examples of the buy button, the cart and the order confirmation.