Repository navigation
Getting Started
Welcome to Archway. This guide takes you from nothing to a working storefront that sells your product subscriptions to your customers, with the payments going straight into your own Stripe account.
Start here. This is where you create your account and subscribe to Archway.
The steps at a glance:
- Create your account
- Subscribe to Archway
- Create your tenancy - your company's own space, with its own address
- Connect your Stripe account
- Publish your products and prices
- Try your store as a customer, then go live
- Optional extras - sign-in options, a second administrator, connecting your own software
Allow about 30-45 minutes for steps 1-6. You can stop after any step and pick up where you left off.
You will need:
- A modern browser - Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, kept up to date.
- An email address you can receive mail at.
- A card to pay for your Archway subscription.
- A Stripe account for your company, activated for live payments - that is, with your business details and the bank account your customers' payments should be paid out to. Stripe walks you through this when you activate the account. You can set Archway up with Stripe's test keys first and switch to live ones when you are ready (step 6).
-
Open the Archway address above. The first thing you are asked for is your region - choose the one closest to you.
About the list. The regions on offer are the ones where our payment provider supports business bank accounts, because that is what decides where a SaaS company can actually be paid. It governs where your company can be based - not where your customers can be. They can be anywhere.
If your country is not listed, please get in touch - more regions are being added.
-
Choose Sign Up and fill in your name, email address, password, time zone and language.
-
Sign in with the email address and password you just used.
Your Archway subscription is what lets you open a storefront of your own.
-
Open the Store. You will see the products on offer with their plans and prices.
-
Choose an Archway plan, add it to your Cart and check out. You are handed to Stripe's secure payment page to pay.
-
After paying you are returned to Archway. Open My Subscriptions and check your new subscription is listed and active. Keep this page open - the next step starts from it.
A tenancy is your company inside Archway. It owns your workspaces, your products and your customers - and it gets its own address, which is where your customers will shop.
-
On your Archway subscription, choose Create Tenancy.
The button appears on the Archway subscription only - if it seems to be missing, check which subscription you are looking at.
-
Fill in the details it asks for. One of them is your subdomain, and it decides your address:
a subdomain of
yourcompanygives youhttps://yourcompany.live.us.app.archwayportal.comChoose it carefully - short, lowercase and recognisably yours. It is the address you will give your customers, and the name your own software uses to talk to Archway.
-
Archway creates the tenancy, refreshes the subscription, and gives you a button to open your new tenancy. Click it - that takes you to your own address, and everything from here happens there.
-
Your new address asks you to choose a region first. That is expected - the region is recorded per tenancy, because your storefront serves your customers from it.
If you briefly see a "maintenance" message while your tenancy is being created, that is expected too. Archway is preparing your tenancy's own database. It clears itself within moments - there is nothing to do but wait.
-
Sign in again at your new address, with the same email address and password. You are the tenancy's owner. Your sign-in does not follow you from one address to another - each tenancy is its own storefront, which is exactly how your customers will experience yours.
Archway takes payments through your Stripe account, so your customers' money goes straight to you.
Everything you set up as an owner lives in Tenant Center, reachable from the menu once you are signed in at your tenancy's address: your payment provider, your products and your prices.
-
In Tenant Center, open your tenancy and add a Payment Provider.
-
Choose the region it serves. You add the provider once per region - if you sell into two regions, that is two entries, each with its own keys. Adding the same provider twice for the same region is refused on purpose.
-
Enter your Stripe keys. There are two sets - test keys for trying things out and live keys for real payments - and each set has two values:
Field in Archway What to enter Where to find it in Stripe Sandbox Payment Provider Account Key Your Stripe account ID - starts with acct_Dashboard → Settings → Business → Account details Sandbox Payment Provider Private Api Key Your test secret key - starts with sk_test_Dashboard → Developers → API keys, with test mode on Live Payment Provider Account Key Your Stripe account ID - starts with acct_as above Live Payment Provider Private Api Key Your live secret key - starts with sk_live_Dashboard → Developers → API keys, with test mode off The keys are hidden on screen once entered, to keep them safe.
-
Leave Live Mode switched off for now. While it is off, Archway uses your test keys and no real money moves; step 6 is where you switch it on.
This step is what opens your store. Until a payment provider is linked and active for a region, your storefront will not open for visitors in it - there would be no way to take their money. If your store will not open for a signed-out visitor later on, come back here first.
Treat the secret keys like passwords. Never send them by email or paste them anywhere other than these fields. If you think one has been exposed, roll it in your Stripe dashboard and enter the new one here.
Products and prices live in Tenant Center too.
-
Create a product - name, description and image.
-
Add a price to it: the amount, the currency and how often it recurs.
-
Approve the price. A price is not offered for sale until it has been approved - so a half-finished price is never visible to a customer.
-
Open the Store at your tenancy's address and check your product and price appear exactly as you intended - especially the amount, the currency and the decimal point.
Before you send customers to your store, buy from it yourself.
-
Sign out.
-
Go to your own address -
https://yourcompany.live.us.app.archwayportal.com- and sign up there with a different email address, as a plain customer. -
Buy one of your products. With Live Mode still off, use one of Stripe's test cards - no real money moves:
Purpose Card number Expiry CVC Payment succeeds 4242 4242 4242 4242any future date any 3 digits Payment is declined 4000 0000 0000 0002any future date any 3 digits -
Check the subscription appears under that customer's My Subscriptions, and the payment appears in your Stripe dashboard's test data.
-
Go live. Sign back in as the owner, open your Payment Provider in Tenant Center, make sure the live keys are entered, and switch Live Mode on. From now on your store takes real payments, paid out to your Stripe account.
Tip: after switching Live Mode on, a single small real purchase - refunded afterwards from your Stripe dashboard - is a good final check that everything is connected.
Your store is open. Share your address - https://yourcompany.live.us.app.archwayportal.com - with your customers.
On your tenancy in Tenant Center, the Authentication Providers section lists the ways people can sign in to your store. Add one to let people sign in with that service instead of a password.
The tenancy owner - you - can hand day-to-day administration to someone else. On your tenancy in Tenant Center, choose Change Admin and enter the email address the person uses for their Archway account - they need to have signed up already. They get administrator access to the tenancy; ownership stays with you.
If your product is software, it can check for itself whether a customer's subscription is active - when they sign in, when it starts, or a few times a day.
Every customer account and every subscription in Archway has a secret key. Your customer can copy them with Copy Key in the menu at the top right of their customer account and of the subscription, and enter them into your software. See the API integration guide for the details, with examples in many programming languages and for no-code tools such as Zapier.
- Finding things in long lists. Sections that can hold many rows - subscriptions, products, customers - have a search button beside the expander arrow. Type a few letters and press Enter; clearing the box brings the full list back. A section shows the 100 most recent entries, newest first, so on a long list search is the way to reach older ones.
- Cancelling takes up to an hour to take effect. A subscription shows as cancelled straight away, but what it paid for can keep working for up to an hour.
- Error messages are deliberately brief. If something goes wrong you will usually see "Something went wrong. Please try again." rather than technical detail - that belongs in our logs, not on your screen. If it keeps happening, get in touch and tell us the time you saw it.
- On a phone or tablet - Archway works in any modern mobile browser too.
Email support@adaptableapps.net. A couple of sentences is fine.
To help us help you quickly, include:
- What you did - the steps, in order.
- What happened, and what you expected instead.
- When it happened, with your time zone - "about 14:35, SAST" is enough. This is the most important line, because the time is how we find the details in our logs.
- A screenshot, if the problem is something you can see.
- Your browser and device - "Chrome on Windows", "Safari on iPhone".
Never include your password or your Stripe secret keys. We will never need either of them to look into something.