How CIQRA Pay works

CIQRA Pay is the payments engine behind your store. It takes money from shoppers, moves it to you, and keeps the books straight — so you can focus on selling rather than on plumbing card payments together yourself.

Note

This is a conceptual overview. CIQRA Pay is built into your store and is set up during onboarding, so there’s no dedicated payments settings screen to walk through yet. The behavior described here is what actually happens behind the scenes.

Built on Stripe Connect

CIQRA Pay runs on Stripe Connect, a trusted global payments platform. That gives your store bank-grade payment processing, card handling, and fraud tooling without you needing your own merchant account with a card processor.

To start accepting money, your store completes a one-time onboarding to CIQRA Pay. Until that onboarding is finished, charges can’t be captured — so a brand-new store won’t be able to take a live payment until it’s done. If payments aren’t going through at all, onboarding is the first thing to confirm; see A payment was declined or can’t be taken.

The money flow: charge → balance → payout

Every sale moves through the same three stages:

1. Charge. When a shopper checks out, CIQRA Pay charges their card or payment method for the order total.
2. Balance. The money from that charge accrues into your CIQRA Pay balance — funds that belong to you but haven’t reached your bank yet. Your dashboard shows an available to pay out balance.
3. Payout. Your available balance is paid out to your connected bank account.

So the money you’ve earned isn’t scattered across individual orders — it collects in one balance and is settled to your bank as payouts. Payouts are covered in detail in Get paid — payouts and your balance.

Fees and your net

CIQRA Pay charges a fee on payments, which is deducted from the amount you receive. Because of this, an order records both what the customer was charged and the net you keep after the CIQRA Pay fee.

On an order you’ll typically see the money side expressed as three figures:

• Charged — the total the shopper paid.
• CIQRA Pay fee — the deduction for processing the payment.
• Net — what actually lands in your balance for that order.

Tip

When you’re reconciling your books, the Net — not the charged total — is what flows into your balance and, ultimately, into your payouts.

New accounts and reserves

To cover the risk of refunds and disputes, a new account may carry a risk-based reserve — a portion of funds held back for a period before it becomes available to pay out. This is a standard safeguard on new payment accounts and eases over time as your store builds a track record. Reserves and disputes are explained in Refunds and disputes.

Where CIQRA Pay surfaces

You’ll encounter CIQRA Pay in a few everyday places:

• On orders, as the charged / fee / net breakdown for each sale.
• On returns, where a refund flows back through CIQRA Pay to the original payment.
• As your balance and payouts to the bank.

It also underpins selling in multiple currencies and gift cards.