How To Accept Stripe Payments In WordPress Forms? Collect One-Time And Recurring Payments

For many online business owners, the ability to collect customer payments within their forms is a definite advantage. Stripe is an excellent option for accepting credit card payments on your WordPress website.

Accepting online payments from your customers is simple using Stripe. Many companies already use Stripe for accepting online payments because they don’t need to go through a lengthy process to get a merchant account.

Anyone with a legitimate business will be accepted and can start to collect credit card payments online with a Stripe account. Your customers don’t need to have a Stripe account. All they need to do is to enter their credit card information on your website to make a payment.

Stripe is a popular payment gateway (see WooCommerce payment gateways comparison) option for WordPress sites. The only problem you may have is deciding which plugin to choose for collecting payments via Stripe.

Here are some of the benefits of using Stripe to accept online payments:

• No hidden costs – There are no hidden costs involved in using Stripe, unlike PayPal.
• Simple setup – It only takes a few minutes to create a Stripe account and start accepting payments from your customers.
• Proven payment gateway – Stripe has become one of the most trusted online payment services. Companies of all sizes, including Fortune 500 businesses, use Stripe every day.
• Improved conversion – Customers stay on your website instead of being redirected to another site during order checkout. This leads to better conversion rates.

You don’t need any programming knowledge or experience to use Stripe. However, you do need SSL/HTTPS encryption on your site for Stripe to work correctly. If you don’t already have an SSL certificate for your website, then check my step by step guide on how to add SSL in WordPress.

 

Why WPForms For Stripe Payments?

WPForms is one of the most popular form builder plugins. It allows you to use PayPal or Stripe to collect payments from your customers on your website.

Besides the standard Stripe-powered payment forms, you can create forms such as registration forms, conversational forms, survey forms, contact forms, file upload forms, etc.

 

 

The plugin even allows you to create a donation form for your non-profit organization or order forms for your digital downloads. All of this can be done without hiring a developer.

Once you’ve created your online payment form, you can connect it to Stripe to start collecting customer payments.

Building payment forms in Stripe is incredibly easy, thanks to WPForms’ drag and drop form builder. It also includes a PayPal addon that can be used for collecting payments.

You can allow users to decide if they want to pay via PayPal or Stripe using a single form. The plugins’ smart conditional logic lets you hide or show specific fields according to user selection.

Here are a few ways that you can apply smart conditional logic with payment forms:

• To collect donations – You can allow your site visitors to make donations using PayPal or Stripe (see Give vs Charitable free donation plugins compared).
• For order form upsells – You can display an HTML block with exclusive offers to customers who purchase the highest priced option available.
• For consultants and agencies – If your client is above a certain dollar amount, you can then show them the next question.

 

How To Create Stripe Payment Forms in WordPress Using WPForms?

WPForms is a freemium WordPress form builder. The plugin was created by Awesome Motive, Inc., the same company behind MonsterInsights, OptinMonster (see OptinMonster vs Thrive Leads comparison), RafflePress, SeedProd, and others.

The free version of the plugin, WPForms Lite, has over two million active installations. The lite version works well for newsletter subscription forms, basic contact forms, and suggestion forms.

 

 

The premium version of WPForms is helpful for more advanced features such as file uploads, form abandonment (see how to reduce form abandonment in WordPress), and conditional logic.

Accepting payments also requires the premium version of WPForms. A Pro license or higher is necessary to access the Stripe add-on.

Just install WPForms on your WordPress site, and you can install and activate the Stripe add-on right away. You can do this by going to WPForms > Addons. Then install and activate Stripe Addon.

Then go into the WPForms > Settings menu that’s on the left-hand side of your WordPress site and click on the “Payments” tab. The Currency tab will let you change the currency setting if necessary. Scroll down to the Stripe section after you’ve selected your currency option.

Go to the “Connection Status” field. Click on the blue “Connect with Stripe” button that appears. The next thing that you’ll need to do is activate the connection between Stripe and your online forms.

 

 

When you click on the “Connect with Stripe” button, you will be redirected on a page with few questions. The content that you’ll see on page will differ depending on whether or not you’ve already activated your Stripe account.

You’ll be redirected back to your site’s admin area after you’ve agreed to the requirements. A green checkmark will appear next to the “Connection Status” field.

 

Adding Stripe to Forms

Once you connected your Stripe account with WordPress site, you can start accepting payments online. The first thing to do is to either edit an existing form or create a new payment form. Each form will need the following fields:

1. A Stripe credit card field
2. An items field (checkbox items, dropdown items, single items or multiple items)

Go to the WPForms menu and click on “Add New” to add a new form. This will bring you to a setup page in the form builder. Pick a name for your form, and then select the “Billing/Order Form” option.

 

 

You can use a blank form if you want, but the billing form will give you a headstart as it will load commonly used fields for this purpose. Just can edit individual fields or add new.

After you’ve used the form builder to add needed fields, you can go to the Payments menu and select the Stripe option. Here you can click on the box marked “Enable Stripe payments.”

 

 

You can add a brief Payment Description here that will appear on your customers’ credit card receipts. The last step is to add an email field in the Stripe Payment Receipt field so that Stripe can send your customers receipts automatically via email.

 

How To Set Recurring / Subscription Stripe Payment Forms?

Start by going into the Subscriptions section. Check the box marked “Enable recurring subscription payments.” Once you’ve done that, the following settings will display:

• Customer Email – Use this dropdown to choose an email field in your form that can be used to contact your clients. This step is mandatory for creating customer subscriptions in Stripe.
• Plan Name – Here, you can enter a description for each subscription, such as “Donation to XYZ Charity.” The title will then be displayed in the Stripe transaction.
• Recurring Period – This is the frequency of the recurring payments. You can choose between daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-yearly, or yearly recurring payments.

 

 

You can also use the Stripe add-on for conditional logic. Using conditional logic lets you design your own “smart forms” that will alter each form according to the selections that each user makes.

The number of ways that you can use conditional logic in your forms is almost endless. For instance, you can use conditional logic to:

• Make payments optional – Customers may make a suggested donation if they so choose.
• Let your customers decide if they want to use Stripe or PayPal to pay for items on your site.
• Give your customers the freedom of choice if they want to make recurring donations/payments or just make a one-time donation/payment.

 

Creating Stripe Payment Forms Conclusion

There are many reasons why businesses use payment forms on their WordPress websites. Adding payment forms is an easy way of receiving credit card payments. It’s a very convenient option for site owners who want to sell products and services online but don’t necessarily want to open a full-fledged eCommerce store.

Non-profit organizations and developers can integrate payment forms in their WordPress sites to accept donations from their patrons and supporters. This option can even be designed to create recurring payments regularly.

Recurring payments (see how to set up recurring payments in WooCommerce)  are an intriguing option for people selling subscription-based services, online courses, or other similar services.

WPForms’ Pro version makes online payments simple. You can easily accept credit card payments using Stripe or PayPal. It’s an effective solution for anyone who wants to create effective payment forms without having to buy a third-party plugin, install complicated software, or build an eCommerce site from scratch.

The plugin allows you to create an unlimited number of payment forms. Your forms can be placed anywhere on your site pages, in posts, sidebar widgets, and other locations. It only takes a few minutes to create your forms so that you can start accepting online payments right away.

WPForms does a lot more than just helping you set up online payment forms. It can be used to gather electronic signatures (check best WordPress digital signature plugin) from your clients, design multiple-page or advanced forms using complex logic, or even protect forms from spam to name just a few features.

JetFormBuilder and WPPayForm (see WPPayForm review) are also great way to accept Stripe and PayPal payments using your WordPress forms. Or if you are using WooCommerce, then check WooCommerce Stripe payment gateway plugin from WebToffee.

If you need plugin to accept payments via Paddle payment gateway, then WPSmartPay plugin is a great choice. It comes in version for WooCommerce or for Easy Digital Downloads plugin.