Create a WordPress form to accept payments in 3 easy steps
August 26, 2019
If you have set up a website for your business and make money by selling physical or digital products or ask for donations, it can be difficult to find a solution to accept payments from customers that isn’t too complicated. Luckily it’s not too difficult to set up a WordPress form to accept recurring payments.
This is useful if you offer monthly subscriptions, memberships, or donations, allowing repeat customers to continue to purchase from you.
Giving your existing customers the option to pay you on a regular basis for your products or service, will help you to save as well as make money so it’s a good idea to learn how to get this set up.
It might sound as though it would be too complicated to set up without a professional’s help, but with one simple WordPress plugin you can easily get forms set up for regular payments.
Here is a three-step guide on how to set up a WordPress form to allow both one-time and recurring payments…
How to enable recurring payment functionality on your WordPress forms
Step 1 – Creating a new WordPress form
To start you will need to install the WPForms Plugin – there are options available from just $39 per year.
WPForms allows you to accept recurring payments using PayPal and Stripe. Here we’ll explain the process for Stripe.
- Activate the WPForms Plugin
- Go to WPForms > Addon
- Locate “Stripe addon”.
- Go to WPForms > Add New and create a new form.
In this example, we’ll create a donations form which allows your customers to make either a one-time donation or recurring payments.
This is what the form looks like before customising any of the fields:
Step 2 – Customising your WordPress form
You can customise the form to your requirements by dragging additional fields from the left-hand side to the right. Then simply click on the field to make your changes.
You can also rearrange the order of the fields by dragging and dropping the form field.
To be able to accept recurring payments using Stripe you will need to add the following form fields as a minimum:
- An items field such as Single Item, Multiple Items, or Dropdown Items
- A Credit Card field
It’s also a good idea to add a Total field so your customers know exactly how much they’re going to be charged.
You can see from the example below that we also added a Donation Options dropdown menu so people can choose whether they’re making a one-time or a recurring payment. We also included fields to select the donation amount and to enter credit card details.
Step 3 – Configuring your payment settings
Once you’ve finished setting up your form you need to configure the payment settings to allow people to send you money using the Stripe payment gateway.
- Go to Payments > Stripe
- Click the checkbox labelled Enable Stripe payments.
- Give your payment a description
- Select Email as the Stripe Payment Receipt.
If you’re only accepting one-off payments then you’re ready to add the donation form to your website.
However, if you want to accept recurring payments you need to do a bit more customisation.
- Scroll down on the Stripe settings panel
- Under the Subscriptions section click the checkbox labelled Enable recurring subscription payments
You also need to configure the following fields:
- Plan Name – this is the title of the subscription that will appear on the Stripe transaction
- Recurring Period- how often do you want people to be able to make recurring payments? For instance, weekly, monthly, yearly.
- Customer Email – by selecting Email from the dropdown menu, you’ll be able to send a notification to the customer once the form is submitted. Stripe’s recurring functionality won’t work without an email address for the customer.
As you’re giving people the option to make either a one-time payment or recurring payments you need to set the conditional logic rules. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds:
- Select the checkbox Enable conditional logic.
- Configure the rule to say: Process payment as recurring if Dropdown is Monthly.
- Save
By doing this anyone who has opted for recurring donations will automatically have their payment processed according to the time interval set on the form.
How to set up a WordPress form to accept payments in 3 easy steps... Click To TweetNow you can add the form to your website! But don’t forget to test it first to make sure everything works as it should.
Hopefully, that has explained how to set up a WordPress form to accept recurring payments and will allow you to make more money through your website.
Good luck!
An amazing and much-needed post as you need a payment option on your website to receive some kind of payments. Your post helps in setting up one such payment option and the way you’ve represented this process is simply amazing and will help a lot of readers et up on their website as well. Great work keep it up.