I don’t find it easy to take days off and the Holiday season was ripe for accomplishing something I’d planned to do for some time — build a feature into my site that enabled my clients to pay my invoices with a debit or credit card if they wanted to. With most people using direct payment via their bank accounts, this hasn’t been high on my list of priorities, but I do occasionally have clients in the US and Canada, so I decided that ticking it off my ever-growing list of “nice to haves” was a good way to start 2017.
I’ve worked with Stripe before — I fell in love with it last year, when I ditched the clunky FuturePay (by WorldPay) and built a custom system for managing my clients hosting payments by subscription.
The finished page for invoice payments worked perfectly, but I wasn’t entirely happy with it, because it felt like a hack that I’d rammed into my site and that’s NEVER good enough in my book.
After a chunk more work, the payment page I’d built for myself looked and worked exactly the same, but it had evolved into a self contained plugin that can be dropped into any WordPress site and give the owner the same ability that I now have; taking card payments for invoices online via the totally brilliant Stripe API.
It doesn’t get much simpler than this — get the details of the payment from the client,
let the client check the details they’ve provided,
submit the details and process the transaction,
say “thank you” and send a receipt.
Using settings screens in the WordPress admin panel, the payment screen is customised with the site owner’s logo and an email address can be specified for receipt of payment notifications (if none is entered on this screen, the WordPress admin email is used) .
The plugin can be put into test mode for… well… testing purposes!
If you’re interested in having Slikkr Stripe Payments on your WordPress site, get in touch!