A US LLC and a US bank account make you eligible to apply to Stripe. They do not make you approved. Stripe underwrites the business — what you sell, to whom, and how likely you are to generate disputes — and it does that largely by reading your website.
Eligibility versus approval
Stripe operates in a defined list of countries. Your LLC being registered in the United States with a US bank account puts you inside that list even when you live elsewhere. That is eligibility.
Approval is a separate, human-influenced review of risk. Two identical companies can get different outcomes depending on what their websites say.
What the review actually looks at
Your website
This is the heart of it. A reviewer opens your domain and looks for:
- What you sell, stated plainly on the page they land on.
- Prices, or a clear explanation of how pricing works.
- Contact details — an email address at minimum, ideally more.
- Terms of service and a privacy policy.
- Refund or cancellation policy, especially for subscriptions.
- Company identity — the legal entity named somewhere, usually the footer.
Missing terms and refund policy is the most common single gap. It is also the easiest to fix.
Consistency
The business description in your Stripe application, the content of your website and your expected volumes should describe one business. A form saying "digital marketing agency" beside a site selling downloadable templates reads as a mismatch, and mismatches get escalated.
Your industry
Some categories are prohibited outright and some are restricted. Digital goods, SaaS, consulting and most e-commerce are straightforward. Anything near financial services, supplements, adult content, gambling or crypto attracts far more scrutiny or an outright refusal.
Before you apply
- Finish the website. No "lorem ipsum", no empty pages, no broken links.
- Publish terms, privacy and refunds as real pages with real URLs.
- Put the legal entity name in the footer. "Kelhos Brand LLC" — the registered name.
- Make the contact route real. A form that goes nowhere is worse than no form.
- Match the descriptions. Copy your own site's wording into the application.
- Be honest about volumes. Overstating invites scrutiny; understating causes reviews later when you exceed them.
If you are rejected
Rejections are usually generic and cite the terms of service. That is deliberate. In practice most are one of:
- Website incomplete or inaccessible when reviewed.
- Business description inconsistent with the site.
- Industry outside the supported list.
- An association with a previously closed account.
What to do: fix the substantive gap first, then reply to the notification asking for reconsideration with specifics — what you sell, who buys it, how you deliver, links to the pages you added. A concrete reply is read differently from a plea.
What not to do: open a second account under a different name. Stripe links accounts by entity, bank details and device signals, and that route ends with both closed.
If Stripe will not work
It is not the only processor. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy act as merchant of record, which means they take on the payment relationship and the sales-tax handling — often easier for a non-resident selling software. PayPal Business has a different risk profile. For marketplace payouts, Payoneer is frequently simpler.
Merchant-of-record platforms charge more per transaction. What you buy with it is far less compliance work.
After approval
Approval is not permanent. Accounts are reviewed again when volumes jump suddenly, when the dispute rate rises, or when what you sell changes materially.
- Keep disputes low — clear descriptors, prompt delivery, responsive support.
- Tell Stripe before you change business model, not after.
- Grow volume steadily rather than in a single spike.
- Answer information requests quickly. Silence looks worse than an awkward answer.
Payments sit at the end of a chain: the company, then the EIN, then banking, then this. If any earlier link is weak, this is where it surfaces. We build the whole chain in our LLC formation service.