Pilot Managed Payments on One Paywall

What you can do

• Pilot on a single paywall. Keep the account default off and set one paywall to Use Managed Payments — its eligible checkout sessions run with Stripe as merchant of record while the rest of your traffic is untouched.

• Exclude what you're not ready to move. Rolling out the other direction, turn the account default on and set specific paywalls to Use Default Payments until they've earned the switch.

• Compare modes in your analytics. Checkout and transaction events carry whether Managed Payments was used plus the paywall's override value, so managed vs standard is a breakdown, not a guess.

• Let eligibility checks de-risk the switch. Before anything enables, Superwall confirms your Stripe account and each active product can use Managed Payments, with Stripe's reason shown for anything that can't — usually a product tax code. And transactions that don't qualify at purchase time fall back to standard Stripe rather than failing.

How it works

Enable Managed Payments in sandbox first. Complete the standard web checkout setup, then turn on the Managed Payments switch with sandbox keys and run test purchases. Live and sandbox Stripe environments validate separately, so verify the live configuration before launch.

Pick the pilot paywall. Choose a paywall with enough volume to read but not your single biggest revenue surface, set its Managed Payments override to Use Managed Payments, and leave the account default off.

Watch the labeled data. Compare conversion, refunds, and proceeds between managed and standard transactions in your checkout analytics. Because the mode is recorded per event, the comparison holds up even while both run side by side.

Scale by flipping defaults. When the pilot holds, turn the account default on and use Use Default Payments overrides as the exception list — the migration finishes paywall by paywall, on your schedule.

Use cases

• The cautious pilot: one mid-volume paywall on Managed Payments for a few weeks before anyone signs off on more.

• The gradual migration: default on, exceptions shrinking, until the override list is empty.

• The permanent carve-out: keep specific paywalls on the standard Stripe flow indefinitely while the rest run managed.

• The sandbox rehearsal: prove the full flow with test keys and sandbox purchases before a single live transaction moves.

Get started

• Read the Managed Payments guide — the override table and eligibility statuses are the whole pilot toolkit.
• Enable it in sandbox, pick one paywall, and set its override to Use Managed Payments.
• Still weighing whether to hand the seller role to Stripe at all? Start with the merchant-of-record playbook.
• Create a free Superwall account and turn your payments migration into an experiment.