Sell more courses with Paythen

The best way to structure a payment plan depends on how you deliver your course or service. We cover some popular use-cases below:

Cohort-based courses

If you sell courses that run over specific periods with a set start and end date, you can choose to either collect all payments in advance before the course starts, or to offer people more flexibility, we recommend aligning the payment plan dates to key milestones within your course. Using our date-based payment plans, you can set up plans where everyone pays a set amount when they sign up, and all subsequent payments are made on fixed pre-set dates (see example):

Eg: If your course runs for 6 months from June to November, you could structure a payment plan like this:

1. 10% deposit on sign up (this is collected anytime someone signs up)
2. 20% on 1 July
3. 20% on 1 August
4. 20% on 1 September
5. 20% on 1 October
6. 10% on 1 November

If you're collecting payments in advance before the course starts, participants that sign up after one or more of the dates have passed are automatically charged those amounts at sign up so there isn't any manual work needed for those late sign ups too.

In addition you can choose to incentivize early repayments by offering a 5% discount for early repayments. This is a built in function that allows customers to easily repay part or all of their plan early at any time via their self-serve customer page.

Workshops & seminars

Since workshops and seminars are typically run over one / a few days, it's best to collect payment in full before the workshop dates. For this, you can use either date-based plans as described above or standard payment plans where people repay over a set number of weeks, fortnights or months from sign up.

For this scenario, we suggest considering using our Pay your way plan type (see an example) which still uses only one plan link – but encourages people to consider paying in full.

You can even incentivize this with a "pay in full discount" shown to them on the payment page. This can encourage some participants that were considering the payment plan option to choose to pay in full at the last minute. As an admin, you get unified reporting and can see how many people choose the pay in full vs. payment plan option. There is no extra admin or work involved for you.

Self-paced online courses

For online courses, we suggest using either the Pay your way plan type described above, or our standard payment plan option as self-paced courses are typically completed by participants at any given time and don't have any set dates.

Depending on your business model, course structure and course length, to minimize risk of non-payment, we always recommend collecting all payments before the entire subject material or completion certificates has been delivered / is made available. Using our Zapier app, you can set up workflows with your LMS or other systems to only give participants their completion certificates once their plan is completed. Since most learning management systems have a Zapier app, there are many other workflows you can set up between Paythen and your LMS to get it right for your business.

If you have a different business model and want a recommendation on how best to configure and offer payment plans to maximize sales and minimize any risks for you, just reach out via the chat icon or email hello@paythen.co and we'd love to help. We can also help you get set up so your workflow is just how you need it.

Paythen has some direct integrations – a native WordPress plugin that lets you offer Paythen in minutes on your WooCommerce store (more), a companion product called Cardivo (built by us) that lets you offer digital gift cards that are redeemable on your Paythen plan pages, WooCommerce store or even manually for other scenarios (more).

For Shopify, because of API access limitations imposed by Shopify, there is an email-based workflow that sends customers an eamil with their payment plan link once they check out. Read more on that here.

For all other integrations and workflows, we have our fully featured and constantly improving Zapier app that lets you send data from Paythen into other systems, or lets you send custom payment plan links via email based on actions in your other systems. Using our Zapier app, you can send data to and trigger payment plans from over 6,000 other tools so most workflows you can envision are available.

At the moment, Paythen does not have an open, publicly accessible API. If this is something you're interested in, let us know via the chat icon as that helps as prioritize future features better.

We offer personalized support via email, chat and self-service to all our customers. Most support enquiries are answered and resolved within an hour. We're happy to help with almost anything related to getting you set up, whether it's within Paythen or on your site/store. Just ask.

No. Paythen is not a buy now pay later credit service like AfterPay. We use AfterPay as an example below, but the points below apply to most buy now, pay later services like Klarna, Affirm and many others.

Once you create a plan in Paythen, your customers get to choose to pay the full amount immediately or via a payment plan that you've defined. Both options require your customers to use their credit or debit card to pay. This means 100% of your customers can choose a payment plan option instead of only those that get approved for credit.

• AfterPay is a credit service. With Paythen, your customers can get get a payment plan, but they can use their existing credit or debit card to do so.
• AfterPay is like a mini-loan, with Paythen, there is no credit provided – this is not only more responsible, but also more flexible and better. Your customers get to choose how they want to pay, and which payment method they want to use, while you pay lower fees and deliver a better customer experience.
• AfterPay has a fixed 8 week repayment period. This is rigid, and can still be very high for high value items. With Paythen, you can set the payment plan interval to whatever you want – weekly, monthly, fortnightly, or any other custom interval – and you also choose how long it goes for.
• AfterPay takes away your direct relationship with your customer – and build their brand, instead of yours. With Paythen, there is little to no Paythen branding involved – we just give you the mechanism to offer split payments, while giving you the reporting and flexibility you need.
• AfterPay takes away a big chunk of your profit margin with each transaction. With Paythen, you get to decide – you pay a low 2% per transaction with no monthly or other fees. You do pay the payment processing fee to Stripe, which is the payment processor.
• Paythen is a complete billing and payment system that gives you ease of use, reporting and insights and important features for your customers whereas AfterPay and others are just credit providers.
• Paythen is built on top of Stripe – the world's most popular (and in our opinion, the best) online payment processor. This means from day one, you can accept payments in hundreds of currencies.

We go into more depth on the comparison as well as the pros and cons of BNPL vs Paythen in this article.

Yes you can – with most of the popular form builders. As long as your form builder allows you to set a custom redirect url after form submission, you can get your customers to complete the form, then redirect them to the Paythen plan payment link to complete payment (or the other way around).

Using Paythen is super easy if you intend to charge all your customers the same total payment plan amount – eg: $1,000 over 10 weekly payments. To do this, all you have to do is create a payment plan in Paythen and add the link to that as the success redirect url in your form submission settings.

However, Paythen isn't limited to just that – in most cases you're using a form builder like JotForm, Gravity Forms or others because you want to offer your customers a selection of different products or services and the total amount payable for each customer can be different. You can also use Paythen in this instance where each customer's payment plan amount is going to be different, as long as your form tool supports passing the total to the success page url. We know you can definitely do this with JotForm and Gravity Forms but most form builder tools should have this capability.

Here is a demo JotForm form that shows you exactly how the flow would work for customers when you want to offer a payment plan using JotForm and Paythen.

Your customers will fill out the form in your form tool, click on the CONTINUE button, and be shown their own custom payment plan page to complete their payment and begin their payment plan. You can even add optional additional admin fees if you prefer.

To create a similar set up and offer payment plans using your JotForm form (or other form builder), these are the steps. We'll use JotForm as an example below but this works with most form builders:

1. Create your free Paythen account
2. Create a template in Paythen by following these steps, then copy the template link
3. Go to your JotForm dashboard and create your form with all the fields you want
4. Open the form settings page where you can edit the behaviour of the form after submission
5. Choose the "Redirect to an external link after submission" option and in the url box, paste in your Paythen template link which will be like this: https://app.paythen.co/template/jy76dxr
6. Now add the following information after the template link:?plan_name={name} payment plan&price={totalamount}&name={name}&email={email}So once you are done, the full URL field will look like this: https://app.paythen.co/template/jy76dxr?plan_name={name} payment plan&price={totalamount}&name={name}&email={email}Noting that only plan_name and price are the two required fields. The reason we pass name and email is to make it simpler for your customers to not have to fill out their own name and email again on the payment page.The values in the curly brackets eg: {name} and {totalamount} come from your form. These actual values will vary based on the form builder you're using.
7. You can complete the steps on this demo JotForm form to see how the flow will work for your customers.
8. Specifically for JotForm, there is a hidden field here that gets the total amount from your form and passes that to the success URL. This uses the calculation widget field – you can read how that works here.

If you're trying to set up a workflow with any form builder and Paythen, get in touch with us via the chat icon and we'll help you get this up and running.

Paythen has no fees for the first 7 days during your free trial. After this, Paythen is just a low 2% per transaction. There are no other fees or charges. We get paid only when you do!

As with all billing systems, Paythen's fees are separate to Stripe fees.