In this article I’ll discuss what I have found to be the Simple way of selling services and subscriptions from a WordPress website. I will revel the exact solution I have been using for the past year (with no issues) and it only takes about 20 minutes to set up. Plus, you can now signup for a course where I teach you step-by-step how to set up and manage your payment solution.
When I first started my support business, I knew I would need the ability to take payments from my website. I also knew that I was not going to use a plugin like WooCommerce because it would be way too much bulk (plugin overkill) for selling a handful of services.
Additionally, with WooCommerce I knew it would cost me a couple hundred dollars a year to get the right extensions to be able to even handle subscriptions.
The hunt was on!
In my search I found a couple of different possibilities, however, there was only one that stood out as the most simple.
With WP Simple Pay you can start accepting one-time and recurring payments on your WordPress site without setting up a shopping cart. No code required.
What’s Required
First off, you need to be integrating with a WordPress website, hopefully that was obvious.
You also need to have a minimum of PHP 7.0 and you must have an SSL installed.
For a full list of requirements you can check them out on the WP Simple Pay help page.
You will also need to use Stripe.com as your payment processor, this is the only payment processor this plugin works with!
Getting Started
You’ll need to purchase a license for the WP Simple Pay Pro plugin.
Yes, it’s a premium plugin, but for what this plugin does, the price is very reasonable!
Let me put it this way.
You could do this with WooCommerce (a free plugin), but then you’ll have to order the Subscription extension, which cost $199/yr for 1 website.
WP Simple Pay Pro is only $49/yr for 1 website.
Once you have your license you can follow the install and setup instructions in the WP Simple Pay help, or take my FREE course where I’ll walk you through step-by-step how to setup the plugin, stripe, and do the integration.
Stripe Setup
You’ll need to have a Stripe account, if you don’t you can sign up for free at stripe.com.
When setting up the Stripe account you will need to provide business info to verify your account, just make sure you have all that info handy.
In Stripe you are going to need your API keys to integrate with WP Simple Pay.
Stripe is also where you will setup your products/services and subscriptions.
Things like, name, description, and pricing. You can also use Stripe to handle your order notification emails, which I recommend.
They have great help documentation and their UI is easy to navigate, but if you want more assistance with the setup you can take my FREE course where I walk you through the step-by-step of setting up your stripe account.
The Integration and Product Setup
Once you’ve got WP Simple Pay Pro setup and Stripe setup, you’re ready to integrate the two and start building out your products in the plugin and posting them on your WordPress website.
Stripe uses API keys to integrate with third party solutions like WP Simple Pay.
PRO TIP: There are ‘Live’ and ‘Test’ API keys. You will want to integrate both, so that you can test everything before sending your clients to place their orders.
They have great setup instructions in the WP Simple Pay help, or take my FREE course where I’ll walk you through step-by-step how to setup the plugin, stripe, and do the integration.
Managing Orders, Subscriptions, and Customers
Stripe has a real clean and easy to use interface, once you get use to it. I usually just manage everything there.
You can cancel subscriptions, upgrade downgrade customer subscriptions, change payment methods, issue refunds, retry failed orders, and much more.
If you would prefer your customer/clients have the ability to manage their own subscriptions, there is another great WordPress plugin that integrates with Stripe and WP Simple Pay Pro. It’s called cloudswipe.net.
This allows your customers to create user accounts on your WordPress site and manage their subscriptions, cancelations, payment method changes, etc….
Quick note, this is what I cover in Module 5 of my FREE course, get started here!
Conclusion
I’m sure with this article and the support documentation I’ve referenced throughout, you could successfully setup your WordPress website with the WP Simple Pay Pro plugin and Stripe without too much complication.
…But…
If you’d like a complete guide and walkthrough on how to do every step in the process, take my FREE course here!
You’ll be glad you did.
Here is an outline of the course and what you’ll get…(module 1 is basically a more detailed version of this article)
I am looking for a WordPress cart and gateway that can manage both subscriptions and one-time payments like Amazon cart does.