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Article Abstract

Addressing the risk control challenges faced by domestic users during the Stripe registration and activation process, this article provides a detailed breakdown of the complete registration process through overseas regions such as Singapore from an individual user's perspective. Key steps include choosing a non-mainland China IP, using an international email address, filling in compliant business information, and binding a local bank account, while emphasizing the importance of information authenticity and stability in avoiding risk control. Although identity verification is still required after successful registration to enable the payout function, this solution provides a feasible path for scenarios such as overseas project development and independent website building, helping users avoid account restrictions caused by mismatched information such as addresses and phone numbers, and laying the foundation for subsequent cross-border payment collection and tax compliance.

Qwen3-14B · 2026-06-18

1 Introduction

Stripe is one of the world's mainstream payment service providers and the preferred payment collection channel for many overseas platforms (such as Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Buy Me a Coffee, etc.) as well as independent websites. However, for users in mainland China, wanting to register a usable Stripe account and successfully bind a payout account often faces some barriers: the official service is not yet available in mainland China, and domestic addresses, phone numbers, and bank cards often trigger risk control, leading to registration failure or account restrictions.

Currently, most tutorials on the internet about Stripe registration and activation are written from the perspective of a company or team, often requiring the business license of the registration location, a company tax ID (such as US SSN or EIN), a local phone number, or even real local legal representative information, which is obviously impractical for individual users.

In fact, if you just want to successfully register and activate a Stripe account, the process is not complicated, and the information requirements do not have such a high barrier. As long as you prepare a relatively reasonable set of information (such as a supported registration address, phone number, and identity information), you can smoothly complete the account activation.Of course, if you want to truly achieve payouts and payment collection in the future, you also need to prepare a local bank account in the registration location(such as a Singapore bank card), which will also be mentioned in the article.

This article is written from theindividual user'sperspective, fully documenting my entire process of registering and activating a Stripe account from scratch, including region selection during registration, filling in information, how to avoid common risk control triggers, and precautions for binding a local bank account.

If you plan to do overseas projects, build independent websites, use third-party platforms to sell digital products, or just want to have a Stripe account that can collect payments and make payouts normally, then this article might save you a lot of trial-and-error costs.

2 Register and Activate Stripe

1 Visit the Official Website

First, visit the Stripe official website:https://stripe.com。

It is recommended to use a stable VPN/proxy environment,giving priority to IPs from Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, or other countries supported by Stripe and not blocked by OpenAI. Do not use shared proxies, VPN accelerators, or unstable IPs to avoid the account being judged as high-risk right after registration.

**Item 9:**Please select a non-mainland China region during registration, such as Singapore or other supported countries, otherwise you may be directed to Stripe China. In addition, do not use “invite codes” or “promo links” circulating on the internet, as these may come from bulk registrars who abuse accounts, indirectly affecting your account credit.

2 Registration Email Suggestions

Please be sure to use a mainstream international email address, such as:

Gmail
Outlook (Hotmail)
iCloud
ProtonMail (alternative)

Avoid using domestic email addresses such as 163, QQ, etc., as many Stripe emails cannot be received, and the registration process may get stuck.

After successful Stripe registration,the account email address will be permanently bound and cannot be changed. Even if you registered through a Google account, you can only unlink the Google login method and cannot replace it with another email address.

This means:

One email address can only register one Stripe account;
Only if the account is closed will the email address be released and can be registered again;
So pleasecarefully choose the email address you use for registration, and it is recommended to use an email address that you control long-term and is stably available.

If it is only used for testing or practicing the registration process, you can also try with a secondary email address first. When you are truly ready for long-term use, it is safer to register a formal account again with your primary email address.

3 Country/Region Selection

This step is crucial, although you may be in China,never choose “Mainland China” as the registration country, otherwise you will create aStripe China account(which is currently almost unusable), unable to bind most bank cards, and unable to collect overseas payments.

Recommended registration regions (2025):

Singapore: One of the most stable registration regions currently, with a high registration success rate and relatively loose tolerance for IP and information, suitable for most domestic users to use.
Other clearly supported countries/regions with stable network access: Such as: United States, Japan, Ireland, Estonia, United Kingdom, etc. These regions are suitable for users with more identity resources or more complex purposes.
Hong Kong current status explanation: Although Hong Kong can still be used to register a Stripe account, due to frequent past abuse, risk control has been significantly strengthened. Using Hong Kong registration information is more likely to trigger address verification, payout freezes, and other issues, while withdrawals from Hong Kong virtual banks (such as ZA Bank) are not very stable,It is only recommended to use it after understanding the relevant restrictions.

This article takes using Singapore as the registration country as an example:

4 Business Information

After creating the account, Stripe will guide you to fill in a basic information wizard, which is a necessary step before officially entering the account backend.

Although this step will not immediately enable payment collection or withdrawal permissions, it is equivalent tothe initial certification for registering a Stripe merchant account, and only after completing it can you enter the Stripe dashboard and start subsequent operations (such as adding bank accounts, submitting verification, etc.).

The information you need to fill in includes:

> Business Name: You can fill in a personal brand, blog name, or any name that sounds “merchant-like”;
> Business Website: It can be a real website, or a page that showcases your products or services, such as GitHub, Notion, WeChat Official Account homepage, etc.;
> Business mode and payment frequency: Can be filled in truthfully according to the situation, such as “non-recurring payments” or “recurring payments”;

Note: Although submitting a bank card or ID is not required at this stage,the information filled in will affect Stripe's preliminary judgment of the account, so it is recommended to fill in reasonable and consistent information as much as possible to pave the way for subsequent official activation and payment collection.

Then you will enter Stripe's sandbox mode interface:

Stripe's two modes:

Mode	Purpose	Whether real credit cards can be added
Sandbox Mode (Test Mode)	Used for development and testing	❌ Cannot add real cards, only test card numbers
Live Mode	Real production environment	✅ Can add real credit cards, used for OpenAI billing

After registering Stripe, the default is a sandbox environment, where you can only do some API testing and cannot really use it yet. You need to first complete a process similar to “activating the account” to get a formal Stripe account.

5 “Activate” a Live Stripe Account

Follow the steps in the images below to activate your Stripe account, click ”Get your real account” in the top right corner of the page to start the activation process:

Select business location (Singapore here). For individual users, select ”NO” for the UEN option, keep the business type as default, and click ”Continue”:

Fill in your first and last name in Pinyin, fill in your email normally, and select China for nationality:

Then fill in your date of birth, Singapore address, phone number, personal ID number, and other information.It is recommended to fill in your real domestic mobile phone number, so that you can successfully receive verification SMS sent by Stripe, and it will also be more convenient to receive subsequent account verification or security alerts. Among them,it is recommended to fill in your real domestic ID number, especially if you plan to use this account for formal transactions or payouts later. Although Stripe may not perform strict verification immediately at this stage, once identity verification or withdrawal audits are involved, providing real and verifiable information can significantly reduce risk control risks, avoiding account freezes or being asked for re-verification that is difficult to comply with. I am only doing this for article screenshots, so I did not fill in my real personal ID number, please do not copy me:

Then comes the crucial payout account. Here, you must fill in a real bank account from the registration country. Of course, the bank card account information filled in during this step can be modified later, so you can fill in a reasonable one first (for example, if you choose ICBC, use an ICBC card number, at least the first few digits look like an ICBC card~). It won't verify whether it's real or fake here. For example, I chose ICBC Singapore because I have an ICBC card from a long time ago:

Then add a two-factor verification method that suits you:

Can add multiple two-factor verification methods just in case:

Then select the relevant information for tax calculation. I will skip this for now. Friends who really need to collect payments and withdraw money can research it themselves:

I'm a bit speechless about this climate contribution thing, just choose according to your preference:

Then review all the previously filled-in content and submit it:

Success:

Entering the page again, you can see that the previous sandbox prompt at the top has disappeared:

In general, during the Stripe activation process, to ensure account security and smoothly pass the review, please note the following points:

Avoid using a Chinese mainland address as the registration address: Stripe recommends using an address consistent with the registration country (such as Singapore). If you use a mainland address while your IP, website, phone number, etc., show other regions, it will increase the probability of risk control or verification failure.
Chinese mainland mobile phone numbers can be used: You can safely fill in your real domestic mobile phone number to receive SMS, login verification, or customer support. Stripe supports +86 numbers. If you are concerned about privacy, you can choose not to make this number public on invoices or receipts.
Avoid frequently modifying information and switching device IPs: Stripe records account modification history. Frequently changing your address, bank information, login IP, or operating device can easily be flagged by the system as abnormal behavior. It is recommended to fill in all information at once and maintain a stable login environment.
For bank account information, you can fill in a correctly formatted placeholder account: If you are only doing this to complete activation and do not plan to use Stripe for receiving payments, you can choose any bank (such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China, etc.) and fill in a legally formatted account number as a placeholder. It does not need to be real or usable, but the format must pass validation.
The Statement Descriptor should maintain a consistent style: The merchant name, website, and customer service phone number you fill in should maintain a consistent style as much as possible, such as uniformly using English names, .com domains, support emails, etc., to avoid being misidentified due to cluttered information styles.

In addition, after completing the ”activation” process and obtaining a real account, you will receive an email from Stripe with the following content:

The main content of this email is to remind you: if you wish to use Stripe to receive payments and withdraw them to your bank account, you need to provide additional identity verification materials (such as uploading proof of identity, a selfie, etc., which is why you needed to fill in your real identity information earlier~).

By this time, the Stripe account has been activated. However, to officially start receiving payments and making withdrawals, you will be asked later to verify some of the information you filled in earlier, such as phone number, email address, identity, etc. That's why I emphasized filling in real information earlier. I filled in fake information for some parts before, which forced me to cancel this account and register again when I wanted to use it later~:

3 Afterword

This article only sorts out the Stripe registration and activation process step by step, but in reality, if you plan to actually use it forreceiving payments and withdrawals, the challenge has just begun.

For example, you need to prepare a real bank card from the country of registration, such as a Singapore bank account; you may also face Stripe's subsequent risk control mechanisms, transaction reviews, and even tax compliance issues. For individual users, these indeed present a high barrier, but they are not entirely out of reach.

It is worth mentioning that although this article focuses on Stripe receiving payments, but Stripe itself is also a payment method—if the service provider's payment page directly calls Stripe (such as some proxy platforms, API service providers, etc.), you can use the credit card or other payment methods bound to your Stripe account to makepayments, bypassing credit card restrictions on some platforms. Of course, this depends on whether the other party supports Stripe payments. For instance, although OpenAI's official website uses Stripe at the backend, it does not provide a Stripe entry point on the frontend, so it cannot be used directly.

Stripe is a very powerful global payment infrastructure. It can connect not only OpenAI, but also Midjourney, Notion AI, Stability AI, etc.—even your own independent sites or SaaS products in the future can theoretically rely on it to complete the loop. Therefore, you might as well treat this Stripe activation process as a starting point for exploration, rather than the end.

I hope this article can help you avoid some unnecessary pitfalls. Perhaps you don't need the withdrawal function for now, but one day when you have overseas customers, your own products, and the need to run through the entire process, looking back, you will find that you are already on the right track.

Note: Suggestions on the timing of Stripe registration

Currently, using a Singapore IP to register and activate a Stripe account is still a relatively stable and high-success-rate method. However, as the number of users increases, risk control may tighten and information requirements may increase in the future. If you expect to use Stripe for receiving payments or related transactions within half a year, it is recommended to register and activate your account in advance. Once the information is filled out properly, it doesn't matter even if you don't use it for the time being. If you have no clear plans yet, you can record the process and required materials first, and operate as needed in the future for greater safety.

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