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Go live

Apply for a live account, then point your integration at the live environment.

Payments in a sandbox are simulated. To accept real payments, you need a live environment, which Bias creates when your merchant application is approved. Run through the preflight checklist before you switch.

Apply for a live account

From a sandbox, click Get production access on Home, or Activate your account at the bottom of the sidebar.

The Go live card on Home in a sandbox

The application has these sections:

  1. About your business: your legal name, business structure and tax ID.
  2. Business location: your website, addresses and contact details.
  3. Processing: whether you accept cards today, and your average, maximum and monthly sales amounts.
  4. Product and sales: what you sell and how you deliver it.
  5. Personal details: the business’s owner or representative.
  6. Other owners: anyone else with significant ownership. Shown for businesses that can have more than one owner.
  7. Bank account: where Bias deposits your funds.
  8. Documents: shown when you already take $50,000 or more a month in card sales. Upload your EIN letter (unless you applied with an SSN), processing statements and bank statements.
  9. Review: check your answers, then click Confirm & continue and sign the agreement.

Bias reviews your application and may ask for more documents. If it’s declined, you’ll see that on the application.

Switch to the live environment

When your account is approved and activated, its live environment appears in the environment selector at the top of the sidebar, under your business name. Click the selector, or press e, and choose it. In a sandbox, the top of the sidebar is striped.

The environment selector listing a live account and its sandbox

The live environment starts empty. Products, prices, customers, API keys and settings such as branding stay in the sandbox where you created them, so set them up again in live. Team members aren’t copied either. Invite them in Settings → Team while the live environment is selected.

Create live API keys

With the live environment selected, go to Developers → API keys and click Create API key. Live keys start with sk_live_, sandbox keys with sk_test_. A key only works in the environment it was created in. You can view a key’s secret only once, when you create it.

Replace your sandbox key with the live key wherever your server reads it, such as an environment variable. See authentication.

What’s different in live

  • Payments charge real cards and bank accounts. Test cards and test payment method IDs only work in sandboxes.
  • Disputes come from cardholders’ banks. In a sandbox, only test cards create them.
  • Every object has live: true. Sandbox objects have live: false.
  • The payment methods you can turn on in Settings → Checkout are the ones Bias has enabled for your account. Others show Contact Bias to enable this payment method.