You don’t always need a webpage to accept payments. Maybe you advertise your services with social media. Perhaps it’s word of mouth. Or maybe you do have a webpage, but you need an extra plugin or even hire a developer to make it work. Fortunately, there is a way to accept payments online without a website or installing additional plugins. Let me show you how to use Stripe Payment Links.
Why not with a plugin?
I’m talking here about WordPress plugins mostly. There are many (really) reasons why I’ve decided to get rid of the payment plugins from my webpage.
The more you install, the more vulnerable and slow your webpage becomes.
Every plugin you install is a potential source of vulnerability. Every software and application has some bugs and security issues that weren’t discovered yet. I’m talking from experience; I am a software tester by profession.
More plugins quite often mean that your page will become slower. Your database is filled with purchase-related data; plugins add their own CSS, JavaScript, etc. All of this can affect the overall performance of your webpage.
Managing, updates… What can go wrong?
I cannot tell if I’ve had some huge problems after an update of some plugin, but this can happen (check WordPress-related Facebook groups, and you will see). The more plugins you have, the bigger the risk that some won’t work great together, especially shortly after an update. You also have to pay attention to updating your plugins on time because you store clients’ information there. You really don’t want them to be stolen and used by someone who found out about a vulnerability in one of the plugins you use, and you haven’t installed an update that fixes the problem.
Limited payment methods
That was my case. I sell my products to Polish clients. Poland is quite advanced in payment methods and online banking in general; that’s why there are some fantastic, super simple, and easy-to-use payment methods you won’t see anywhere else. And Polish people really use them. So when I realized that Stripe is beta-testing Blik, one of Poland’s most popular payment methods and definitely the most convenient one, I applied for access. And I’ve got it, but the WooCommerce plugin was still not ready and didn’t offer this integration.
Not so pretty UI
I don’t know about you, but I can’t work with the WooCommerce payment page UI anymore. The payment page is crucial for your business. It has to work like a charm and be intuitive, responsive, and fast. I’ve always had trouble with that in WooCommerce. Is it possible that it’s my fault? That I have too many plugins? Some weird CSS is breaking the responsiveness of my webpage? Sure, but I don’t have time nor will to figure it out.
Stripe
Stripe is a payment processor. The main reason why I use it is the fact that I sell in Poland, but my business is in Spain. So I need local (Polish) payment methods but getting verified with Polish payment processors while your business is not in Poland is a process close to hell.
Stripe is available in 47 countries. They have local payment methods as well as local teams verifying your business. Thanks to that, I didn’t have to hire a sworn translator to translate documents. I didn’t have to explain anything about the papers I sent. And it didn’t take me a week to make it happen. My sole proprietorship business was verified by a team assigned to Spanish clients. It took them just a few hours to activate my account, and I could start selling just like that.
Stripe is a fantastic choice also because you can integrate it without knowing how to code with pretty much everything. I don’t remember when was the last time I saw a web application that didn’t have Stripe on its list of payment processor integrations.
Payment links
This is the Stripe feature we will discuss in this article. It simply allows you to generate a payment link. Then you send the link to your client in an email or link it with a button on your webpage. After clicking it, your client will see a friendly and responsive payment page.
The language for the payment page will be picked up from the browser settings of your client. The default country will be detected based on your client’s location. The currency is something you choose while you create a payment link.
You can create payment links in two ways in Stripe.
The easy way
Go to “Products” and add a new product. Once you have, you can create a payment link.
Now you need to decide what fields you want your users to see on the payment page.
You can also set up after-payment behavior.
The not-so-easy but more powerful way
If you want more control over how the payment page looks, you can use Stripe API to send a request to create a payment link. That already requires some knowledge of REST API and how to use tools like Postman.
You can use this Postman Collection of Stripe API requests to start. You can see there an example request that creates a payment link.
This way, you can set up some options that you can’t set up the easy way. For example, you can collect consent to send promotional emails (but that depends on the country of your company and your client’s country).