Adding an online payment system to your website is a great way to create or increase revenue. It helps your business sell products and services more conveniently and can generate income even outside of normal business hours. In addition, offering online payment is a great way to monetize your website as a blogger, freelancer, artist, or entrepreneur.
If you are not a web developer, you might be thinking that this is too complicated to set up for your skill set. However, in this post, we want to show you that it is anything but. The WordPress.com Payments online payment system makes it possible to quickly add buy buttons to your content and collect one-time or recurring income from your pages or posts.
In the following, we will show you how to use it. From setup and connecting to the payment provider over adding buy buttons to your web pages to managing payments and transactions, it’s all there.
Setting Up an Online Payment System on Your WordPress.com Site
First things first: setup. Naturally, in order to start accepting payments online, you have to have both a website and create the means to allow visitors to shop on it. Here’s how to do that.
1. Create a WordPress.com Account
The first thing you’ll need to use WordPress.com Payments is – drumroll – a WordPress.com account. I know, shocking right?. Did you know that you need a Netflix account to use Netflix as well? Where does it end?
Setting one up is easy enough. Go to the WordPress.com homepage and click on one of the buttons that say Get started.
In the next screen, you’ll be asked for an email address, your preferred username, and password.
Enter each and click on Create your account (don’t forget to confirm your email address in your inbox). After that, the setup process will ask for your domain name.
Either sign up for one right there and then (learn how to pick the right domain), opt to choose it later, or use a domain you already own.
The next step is to pick a suitable plan.
WordPress.com Payments are available on all plans in different capacities:
- Free, Personal, Premium, Business – Get paid subscribers, offer premium content, create a paid newsletter, sell digital goods and services
- Personal, Premium, Business – Additionally, collect donations.
- Commerce – Create an online shop with full checkout functionality and the ability to accept payments from 60+ countries.
Pick what makes the most sense for you in order to continue. After that, all that’s left is to go through the checkout process, and you are ready to roll.
2. Connect Your WordPress.com Account to Stripe
After acquiring your WordPress.com account, you need to connect it with our payment processor – Stripe. Setting up an account with them is free and enables you to safely and securely process payments, issue receipts, and transfer funds to your bank account.
We are partnering with Stripe for our online payment system because of their low processing fees and focus on simplicity. They also allow you to charge credit cards on your site and issue refunds without any extra charge, have a strong focus on security, and support one-time as well as recurring payments. Finally, Stripe comes with a great dashboard and detailed analytics and reporting. More on that soon.
To connect your site with Stripe, in your WordPress.com dashboard, go to Tools > Earn.
Here, click on the button to either enable the Payment Button, Donations Form, or Premium Content. All three will take you to a page with a big pink (or is that magenta?) button that says Connect Stripe to Get Started.
Clicking it takes you to Stripe’s website for creating your account.
3. Configure Your Stripe Account
In the first step, enter your email address and click Continue (if you already have a Stripe account, enter the email address for that account to log in). After that, it will prompt you for a password. Enter that as well and move on again.
In the next step, Stripe will prompt you for a two-factor authentication method to increase security.
You can either use your phone number, an authenticator app, or a security key. Choose whatever you prefer and go through the process. You might also have to download an emergency backup code.
Once done, the setup process asks you for some basic information about you and your business, such as its location, type, and industry, as well as personal, business, contact, and banking information.
You will also encounter a page in which you can enter statement descriptors.
This is how payments will show up on your customers’ bank statements, so be sure to choose something that makes sense.
Finally, you can optionally choose to sign up for Stripe Climate, which WordPress.com partners with. Here, you can pledge a small percentage of your revenue to carbon removal projects in order to fight climate change.
Once done, you land on the final page where you can review your information and finalize the process.
Make sure everything is correct, then hit the Agree & submit button. The setup process will automatically return to your WordPress.com site with a success message that your connection has been established.
If you need more details on this entire process, check our support page.
4. Get to Know the Payment Settings
The page you land on after connecting your website with an online payment system shows your payment options and statistics.
You usually find it under Tools > Earn, when you choose to manage any of the payment features.
Right now it’s still a bit bare, however, later you will be able to see stats on your sales and a list of customers and subscribers. It’s also where you can disconnect from your Stripe account if you wish so.
The most important part, however, is where it says Payment plans. Here’s where you configure the purchase options you offer to your visitors.
5. Create Your First Payment Plan
Let’s go over an example. Click on the Payment plans row to get to the following screen:
Here, use the Add a new payment plan button to get to this menu.
This is where you create all the information necessary for offering a product or service on your site. In this case, we want to create a simple, one-time purchase product.
To do so, at the top, first pick your desired currency and amount. After that, under Select renewal frequency, pick One time sale. Then, enter a description in the respective field. This will help you find the payment option in the list later and is also what appears in the email that buyers automatically receive, so keep that in mind.
Here’s what it looks like in the end:
When finished, go to the Email section at the top. Here, you can configure the message buyers receive after their purchase. It’s a perfect place to thank them, send over additional information, or, in this case, provide them with a link to the product they purchased.
You can also allow them to opt in for receiving blog updates in the future at the top.
Once satisfied, click on Save to have your new payment plan show up in your list of products. If you ever want to make changes, click on the three-dot icons on the right to edit or delete individual payment plans.
How to Start Accepting Payments on Your Website
After finishing the steps of setting up your online payment system and product, it’s now time to figure out how to give website visitors the possibility to use them.
1. Add a Payment Button
Continuing with the example from before, we will first add a simple payment button to your content. This happens in the block editor. Therefore, the first step is to create or open the page or post where you want it to appear.
Once there, click on the block inserter button (the big plus button in the upper left corner) and scroll down to the Earn section.
Here, you see all your available blocks that allow financial transactions on your website. For the moment, click on Payment Buttons to get that block on the page.
2. Configure the Button
The result is exactly that, a button on the page that allows visitors to make a purchase that we can now customize, so click on it to do so.
The most important option here appears in the settings bar at the top. It is the option to choose the payment plan that this button is connected to.
Click it to choose what you want (in this case, because there is only one plan, it should already have the right option enabled) or add a new payment plan on the fly. More on the latter soon.
In addition, you have the ability to customize the button text (use a good call to action) including the usual text formatting options (alignment, bold, italic, etc.).
What’s more, with the button active, on the right side you have additional options to customize it.
That includes:
- Text and background color
- Border radius (means whether the button corners are rounded or not)
- Width
- Button fill or outline
- Typography settings (font size, font family, letter case)
With these, you can make the button look however you want, so that it fits your theme. Plus, don’t forget to add the content for what you are actually selling so that your visitors know what it is they are getting. Here’s an idea of what that could look like:
With everything configured correctly, anyone who comes to the page above and clicks on the buy button has the possibility to purchase the product with the price and all other settings you configured earlier.
3. Create a Subscription or Recurring Payment Plan
For the next example, let’s do a subscription-based payment plan. Subscriptions offer the added benefit that they result in repeat income instead of one-off payments. As long as someone subscribes, they will continue regularly paying you money in exchange for access to premium content such as subscriber-only blog posts, newsletters, or online courses.
To show you how this works, let’s set up some premium content. You can do that very easily in WordPress.com.
Use a forward slash or the Add block button to create a new block. Search for the Paid Content block and insert it into the page.
Once there, the first thing you want to do is set up a recurring payment plan, which, as mentioned earlier, you can also do on the fly from inside the editor. For that, choose the Premium Content block, click on the option in the settings bar where you choose the payment plan, and pick Add a new subscription.
This opens up a panel on the right side where you can make the same adjustments as when you created the first payment plan earlier (minus the options for configuring the email, you need to set that up separately later).
So, again, enter a name for your payment plan, then choose your preferred currency, price, and interval (monthly, yearly). When done, click Add subscription. After you are done working, the Paid Content block is automatically connected to the new payment plan.
All that’s now left is to set up said premium content. The block is easy enough to use.
If you click the parent block, you can switch between what a subscriber sees and the guest view. Fill and customize as necessary. Don’t forget about the buttons to subscribe and log in that non-subscribers get to see. Use the document overview if you find it a bit confusing at first.
When you’re done and have published your page or post, happy selling!
Managing Payments and Transactions
Now that you are ready to accept payments on your website, let’s go over what else is important – tracking and managing transactions, doing refunds, and more.
View Payment and Subscription Activity
First, let’s examine what the Payments page has to offer. Again, you get there via Tools > Earn and then click on any of the available purchase options.
The page has three main sections: Earnings, Customers and Subscribers, and Manage Plans. We already talked about the last one, so that leaves the other two.
Naturally, under Earnings, you see your income, both total, for the last 30 days, and what you will have next month based on current subscriber numbers. Customers and Subscribers, on the other hand, shows the people who bought stuff from you including when and what exactly they purchased.
This is great for a quick overview of how the financial side of your website is doing.
In addition, if need be, you can also cancel subscriptions from here. For that, simply click the three dots next to a subscriber and then choose Cancel Subscription.
This will immediately end their payment plan and they won’t be billed again.
Issue Refunds and Manage Disputes
While you can manually cancel subscriptions in the WordPress.com dashboard, doing so does not refund the customer, and neither can you do that from here. Instead, you need to go to your Stripe account, for which you also find a link in the same place as where you can do the cancellations.
Click it to get to the Stripe dashboard.
Here, go to the Payments page, which has a list of all the payments issued through your Stripe account.
Find the one you are looking for and, again, click the three-dot icon, then Refund payment.
You can choose to either send a full refund (default setting) or enter a partial number. You also have to input a reason for the refund. When you are done, click Refund to finalize it.
The dashboard is also where you handle disputes or chargebacks. That’s when a buyer asks their credit card provider to pull the money back from you.
If that happens, it will appear in the appropriate section in the Stripe dashboard (Payments > Disputes), where you can learn more details and take care of it.
For details of how this works in Stripe, check the documentation.
Export Payment Data
The final option we want to talk about is that of exporting your sales data. You might have already seen the button in the WordPress.com dashboard that says Download list as CSV under Customers and Subscribers.
Here, you can download all important data from your sales in order to use them in your accounting or fulfillment software.
In addition, the Stripe dashboard also offers a number of ways to export your financial data. Under Payments > All Transactions, you can hit the Export button to also download a CSV file of your transactions.
You also have the ability to customize the date range and data to export.
Finally, the Reports section provides a number of different financial data and ways to export it as needed as well.
Ready to Add an Online Payment System to Your WordPress Site?
The WordPress.com Payments online payment system is a great way to start earning money with your website without building a full-fledged online store. It allows you to collect donations, provide premium content, and sell digital products with minimum setup.
All it takes to start is to sign up for WordPress.com and Stripe. After that, you can start selling right away thanks to a number of specialized blocks for this purpose. It literally takes minutes to create both recurring as well as one-time purchase options.
There are sensible controls within WordPress, but if you want more detailed tools and options, there is still the Stripe dashboard, which lets you do refunds, disputes, and more.
Hopefully, you have seen how easy it is to start selling on your WordPress.com site. We encourage you to begin right away. And, if you get bitten by the ecommerce bug, you can always take things further with WooCommerce.
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