What’s new

Till now, you could only add terms that customers had to agree to for payment plan and subscription options. For pay your way plans, there was no option to require customers to view and agree to your terms if they chose the pay in full option. Now you can choose to require terms acceptance for either the pay in full or the payment plan option, or for both options in your pay your way plans.

You can activate this on any existing plans you have by editing them and toggling the terms option to “Both payment options” and for new plans you can choose to show terms for either or both options. This helps you be more clear about your policies including how you handle cancellations, refunds and more, regardless of the payment option the customer chooses.

Our brand new plan type – Wait for it payment plans, is a modern version of the layaway / lay-by plan, letting you easily offer a new plan type or modernize your existing layaway offering. The key difference between this and a typical payment plan is that customers expect to pay first, and get their product / service after all payments are made. This lets you offer a complementary payment option to your customers in addition to any existing buy now pay later or payment plan option you already have.

Offering this as an additional or even the only payment plan option gives you and your customers the benefits of a payment plan (more customers for you and accessible payment amounts for them) while eliminating any risk or high fees for you. Since the Wait for it plan is designed to and presented as a pay first, get later option, you are eliminating all risk of non-payment that can come with offering payment plans.

In addition to a modern layaway plan, our Wait for it plans can also be used to incentivize some of your potential customers to wait – by including a built-in discount for those choosing this option. If you’re selling something that has limited stock, or a service or offering with limited spots, offering a discount for customers that are willing to start paying now but receive the product or service later helps better manage demand and encourage some of your customers to wait.

To use Wait for it plans as an additional payment method on WooCommerce if you’re already using our payment plans, you can install our separate Wait for it plugin by downloading it here.

👉  Check out a working demo
👉  Read more about the plan and benefits
👉  Get started with this easy step-by-step guide

Payment plans in Paythen allow your customers flexibility with early payments – allowing them to pay their next scheduled payment early, their full remaining balance, or pay any manual amount early paying off part of one or more scheduled payments. This flexibility was not available to customers on date-based payment plans, our specialized plan type that lets you collect payments from all customers on the same pre-set dates.

Now it is! Customers on date-based payment plans can now choose from the same three flexible early payment options as well.

Encourage happy customers to consider their next purchase with you by sending them a personalized discount. Or say thanks to new customers when they sign up, with a unique discount they can use for their next purchase. Now imagine this on autopilot with no manual work needed (other than a few minutes to set up once).

Offers in Paythen are automatically generated, personalized and one-time-use discount codes that are sent to existing payment plan customers based on conditions you set eg: on sign up, at 80% completion, 100% completion, etc. When a customer meets the offer conditions, we’ll automatically create and send them a discount code personalized with their name and for them to use for their next purchase. Customers that don’t want to receive future offers can one-click unsubscribe via the email footer.

Customers will sometimes request a change to their payment plan or subscription dates to better align with their pay cycles, and to better manage their cashflow. Till now, this change required you to contact Paythen support to assist. Now you can quickly change a customer’s plan dates via the Paythen dashboard.

For customers with overdue payments, you can choose how to handle these – by either continuing retries or moving those payments to the end of the customer’s payment plan.

To change a customer’s dates, just open their customer page when you’re logged in and you’ll see a new “Change plan billing dates” icon in the admin controls for relevant customers. You can also access this via the “more” menu next to each customer on the customers listing page.

For customers that are in progress, you’ll choose the next billing date and see a preview of future dates based on this change.

If a customer has an overdue payment, you’ll be asked to choose how you want to handle this:

Once you confirm, the customer’s future plan dates and payment schedule will update to reflect this change immediately. No automated email is sent to the customer. This functionality is currently available for customers on a subscription or a standard payment plan. Support for customers on date-based payment plans is coming soon.

Gutenberg blocks and blocks-based themes are the default for WordPress and WooCommerce. Many customers have already switched over to this new way of doing WordPress and new WooCommerce stores also default to this new blocks-based experience. Read more about the blocks checkout here.

The Blocks checkout and block themes in general are now supported by our WooCommerce plugin since version 8.0 and higher. Previous versions of the Paythen plugin only worked with the WooCommerce classic checkout. Now, stores using the new default blocks checkout can offer payment plans easily too. You can see this in action on our WooCommerce blocks payment plan demo store.

We continue to fully support the classic checkout experience too. If you haven’t already, download and install the latest version of our WooCommerce plugin via your Paythen settings.

Need to use your payment plan data in another system? Or just want to analyze customers on payment plans better? You can now one-click export your customer data via your Paythen dashboard. Once you’ve exported the data, you can apply filters in Excel or Google Sheets to filter and analyze as needed. This is a small but much requested update that should help make managing payment plans even easier.

See customer progress at a glance with the new admin panel visible on the customer detail page. This is visible only to you as a logged in user and allows you to quickly see a customer’s payment plan progress as well as their current status. Previously, you had to switch between the customer list page and the details page to see the status. The progress indicator also ties in to our newly released offers functionality which lets you send customers automated discount offers based on their payment plan progress. Progress percentage is currently only available for payment plan customers (not date-based payment plans). Support for date-based plans is coming soon.

And easy admin controls for common customer actions like pausing, cancelling and more make your admin workflow faster. Over time, additional admin controls will become available here. This admin controls panel is only visible to you and never to customers when they view their page.

Your customers on payment plans now have three flexible options to make early payments – the existing full plan early payment, and two new flexible options to pay the next upcoming payment earlier or enter any amount. This is a highly requested feature since it helps your customers better manage their cashflow by making smaller or earlier payments that better suit them. We automatically adjust all future amounts and dates when a customer makes an early payment. If you offer an early pay discount, this will continue to work like before and will only be available to customers who choose the pay-in-full early payment option.

If a customer makes a partial early payment that fully covers their next scheduled payment, then that is automatically skipped and immediately reflected on their customer page so they know when their next scheduled payment will be charged. Customers can make full or partial early payments any time via their self-serve customer page, so there is no extra admin for you or your team.

All your existing and new customers will see an updated button on their customer page. The button text adjusts dynamically based on whether you offer an early pay discount or not:

They will then be shown a pop-up with three options, pay just the next upcoming amount, pay the full remaining balance (with a discount if you’ve offered one), or pay any amount they want.

Regardless of the option or amount they choose, all adjustments are handled automatically and immediately. Customers will be shown their customers page with the updated amounts and statuses and they can make additional early payments if they’d like.

Any Zapier triggers you have will continue to trigger for full or partial early payments too. This functionality is available to all customers on standard payment plans. For customers on date-based payment plans, they can pay in full or for the next upcoming milestone but cannot enter manual amounts at the moment. Support for manually entered amounts is coming shortly for customers on date-based plans.

Flexible early payment options help reduce failed payments and improve your customers’ experience with their payment plans.

You can now choose to offer up to three different payment plan options on your WooCommerce store. At checkout, when customers choose the payment plan option, they’ll be asked to choose from up to three payment plan options. Till now, you could only offer different plans based on different cart amounts. With this update included in v0.7.8 and higher of our WooCommerce plugin, you can now offer all customers multiple payment plan options. To use this option, download and install v0.7.8 or higher via your Paythen settings > integrations page here.

Each payment plan option can have completely different settings including billing intervals, surcharges, upfront fees, and more. This lets your customers choose a payment plan option that best aligns with your cashflow and typically helps increases conversion rates.

See this feature in action on our WooCommerce payment plans demo store. As with all features in our plugin, this feature is fully compatible and tested with most WooCommerce customization plugins and checkout flows including popular ones like CartFlows (CartFlows demo), Funnelkit (Funnelkit demo) and many others. If you run into any issues, just reach out to us via chat.

Need to pass some important fields from your checkout to Paythen payment plans? Whether you need customer order notes, company names, or any other fields important to your workflow, you can now map up to 5 additional fields from your checkout and pre-fill their data in visible or hidden custom fields on your customers’ Paythen payment plans. These are then linked to the customer as custom fields and visible to account admins on the customer page in the Paythen dashboard making it easy to keep all relevant context regarding customer payment plans in one place. You can map any default or custom fields you’re using in your store. This feature is available in version 0.7.7 and higher.

To use this feature, download and install v0.7.7 or higher via your Paythen settings > integrations page here. Then add custom fields into your Paythen template and finally, just map each custom field from Paythen using the field ID we’ll provide, to your WooCommerce checkout fields. You can map up to five fields at the moment.The data in these can be visible to customers on their Paythen payment plan page or if you’ve set these custom fields to be hidden in Paythen, the data will get added but won’t show to customers on their payment plan page.

See this feature in action on our WooCommerce payment plans demo store. As with all features in our plugin, this feature is fully compatible and tested with most WooCommerce customization plugins and checkout flows including popular ones like CartFlows (CartFlows demo), Funnelkit (Funnelkit demo) and many others. If you run into any issues, just reach out to us via chat.

Improve the quality of data with our new purpose-built phone field. It automatically validates the format of entered numbers based on the user’s selected country and always saves phone numbers in your Paythen customer data as well as Stripe metadata in a consistent international number format with the country code.

Existing payment plans work relative to when a customer signs up. This suits many use cases but if you’re selling something aligned around a date – events, travel, courses, workshops, retreats, etc, you need more control. Our new date-based payment plans give you this flexibility. They work like you’d expect – instead of setting a billing interval, you’ll choose dates in the future and the amount to be charged on each date. Everyone on the plan is charged on those same dates.

Any customers that sign up after one or more payment milestone has passed are also automatically handled and are charged for any milestones in the past automatically when they sign up.

You can also create templates for use in eCommerce and with third-party forms. You just need to set pre-assigned dates and percentages next to each date, and customers are automatically charged what they owe on each date based on their cart total. This lets you sell different tiers/options to each customer while still collecting all payments on the same dates, making management a lot easier.

Date-based plans also work with all our Zapier triggers and actions. To get started, create your first date-based plan or template from your Paythen dashboard, check out this demo plan or read this getting started guide.

Before now, you could only set default WooCommerce statuses as the ones to automatically move a new payment plan order to in WooCommerce once a customer completes their payment plan sign up. With v0.7.4 and above, you can now set custom statuses (using any third party status management plugin) and they will all now be selectable within your Paythen plugin settings.

This now lets you set up more granular and custom order management workflows internally and better identify orders on a payment plan vs. other payment methods. Once you have created any new order statuses in your WooCommerce store, just go to your Paythen plugin settings and select that status from the Paythen order status dropdown.

Now, once customers have selected the payment plan option at checkout and completed the Paythen payment plan sign up, they will be moved to this new order status. Customers that select the payment plan option and checkout but don’t complete the payment plan sign up will continue to be assigned the “Payment pending” status.

With our WooCommerce plugin v0.7.3 and above, we now pass the WooCommerce order ID in the generated plan name for each customer. This lets you easily identify and match the relevant order in your WooCommerce dashboard to the plan generated in Paythen.

We also pass the same order ID as a url parameter when the plan is generated. This means if you add a new custom field in your Paythen template called wc order number or wc_order_number it will now automatically save this order ID value into the customer’s record as a hidden custom field, and this value is then automatically passed to our Zapier app triggers as well as into your Stripe account as metadata.

Paythen now lets your customers redeem your company’s digital gift cards on your payment plans. To enable this, you just need to sign up and set up your gift card sales page over at cardivo.com (it’s free to sign up). Then enable the Paythen integration with a few clicks.

Offering branded digital gift cards will help you increase your revenue from existing customers that know and like your business, and will drive new customers (their friends and family) to buy from you since Cardivo gift cards can only be redeemed at your business, unlike traditional visa debit cards that add no value to your business and cost you a lot of money.

Cardivo is developed by us and is independent of, but seamlessly works with, Paythen. It is easy to set up and use, just like Paythen, and requires no credit card. Find out more and sign up here to get started. Then follow these steps to enable it in Paythen.

If you have a WooCommerce store, you can also use Cardivo directly on your store’s checkout. Cardivo works with Paythen but is also a fully featured digital gift card platform on its own.

Easily keep track of customers with failed payments, with three new Overdue statuses in Paythen. Till now, customers with one or more failed payment attempts showed as In Progress just like customers with no failed payments.

We’re introducing three new Overdue statuses – to let you easily see any customers falling behind on their plan. Overdue – Retrying, Overdue – At risk and Overdue – Manual action required. For the first two statuses, there is no manual action needed. Re-attempts will continue automatically as per your Stripe settings. Customers whose payments go through will change back to the In Progress status.

For customers showing the third (manual action required) status, they have exhausted all automated payment attempts and a new payment method must be entered. Once it is, the plan may need to be manually resumed from within Stripe. There’s more detail about this and all other statuses in this help article.

With our new Zapier action, you can automatically send custom payment plan links with varying amounts and other fields to your customers. Whether it’s via Shopify, other eCommerce platforms, forms or anywhere else, you can now send dynamic payment plan links to each customer in a beautiful email sent directly by Paythen.

All you need to do is pass some key values in the Zapier trigger step and your customers get a beautifully designed email with your logo and their custom payment plan link with their cart totals or any other amount you passed in the trigger step.

This makes it easier to use Paythen with Shopify, other eCommerce platforms, form builders, CRM tools and even Google sheets. You can trigger customers to receive their personalized payment plan link from any of the 5,000+ apps supported by Zapier.

Get started with Paythen and Zapier here. Reach out via the chat icon if you need a hand getting set up.

Sometimes customers need a break from their payments. You can now pause and resume Paythen payment plans or subscriptions with one click right from within the Paythen dashboard. When a plan is paused, no new payments will go through. Resume payments any time just as easily.

Want to let customers resume payment plans directly? Easy – they can do it anytime with one click via their customer page so you can reduce the time you spend on admin and support.

We’re excited to ship one of our most requested WooCommerce features – the ability to offer payment plans only for specific products. You can now do exactly that with our WooCommerce plugin. You can offer payment plans for one or more products with just two clicks.

To add this on your WooCommerce store, ensure you have v0.6.2 or higher of our plugin installed (you can download the latest version via your Paythen dashboard), then switch ON the relevant “Enable Paythen for specific products only” checkbox in the plugin settings, and click “Save”:

Then go to each WooCommerce product you want to enable payment plans for, and check the “Show payment plan option when this product is in the cart” option, and click Publish:

This option shows up in the right sidebar of the product page edit view, so ensure your theme/view has the sidebar showing if you can’t see this.

You can now check this box for each product that should have the payment plan option. This will show the payment plan option at checkout only if this product is in the cart. If there are other products in the cart, they will be included in the payment plan total also.

Combine this with our product level “how it works” snippet and pop-up to maximize its effectiveness. Read more here.

Not sure how to do this? No worries, just reach out to us and we can help.

If you’re using Paythen on your WooCommerce store, you can now highlight the availability of payment plans on each product page. This lets your customers know they can choose an easy way to pay when they check out. Customers can click on the i icon accompanying this text to see a pop-up that explains how the payment plan process works. In addition to the default text and icons, you can add your own custom text too to provide customers with more context.

See a live demo of how this works on our WooCommerce Demo Store. Here’s a preview of the how it works pop up they’ll see:

To add this on your WooCommerce store, just ensure you have v0.6.2 or higher installed (you can download the latest version via your Paythen dashboard) and then enable this via the plugin settings.

Not sure how to do this? No worries, just reach out to us and we can help.

Do more with Zapier – we’ve added three new triggers to our Zapier app. Get notified for every successful payment, plan completions and plan cancellations. This adds to the existing new customer trigger we had and lets you get more granular with the data you send out of Paythen. Same as the existing trigger, you can set these triggers to work with all Paythen plans or choose specific ones.

We’ve also introduced our first Zapier action: Send payment plan emails to customers. Read more about it here.

Not using Paythen with Zapier yet? Switch it ON in your Paythen account settings to get started.

Till now, you couldn’t edit any data on plans which had customers on them. We’ve now introduced a limited edit option that lets you easily change any text fields like the plan name, description, terms text and more at any time on plans with or without customers.

For plans with customers, you still can’t edit the numbers or plan configuration as this causes issues with existing customers and plan reporting but text edits are now easy. To make bigger changes to the plan, you’ll need to create a copy of the plan and then archive the old plan.

We’ve added some new filtering options in your Paythen dashboard to keep things tidy and easier to manage:

👉 You can now hide archived plans on the plans page in your dashboard

👉 You can now hide cancelled or completed customers on the customers page in your dashboard

If you’re using Paythen on your Shopify store, you can now highlight the availability of payment plans on each product page – just above the Add to cart button. This lets your customers know they can choose an easy way to pay when they check out. Customers can click on the i icon accompanying this text to see a pop-up that explains how the payment plan process works. See a live demo of how this works on our Shopify demo store here. Here’s a preview of the how it works pop up they’ll see:

To add this on your Shopify store, just follow the instructions here. Not sure how to do this? No worries, just reach out to us and we can help.

Maximize your conversions by letting customers pick the length of their payment plans – within a range you define of course! This much requested feature lets your WooCommerce customers decide how many installments they want to pay their payment plan over – aligning it with their cashflow and increasing your chances of getting that sale. This is just a checkbox away in your Paythen plugin settings. You must have version 0.5.3 or higher of the plugin to see this functionality.

Once you have it installed, just check the box to let customers choose the number of installments, enter a minimum and optional maximum number and each customers will be able to choose their installments at checkout. The billing interval (weekly or monthly) will remain whatever you’ve set in your template. You can download the latest version of the plugin from the Integrations tab in your Paythen account.

We’ve released a big new update to the payment fields for all plan types in Paythen – these look slightly different but have huge changes behind the scenes that will allow us to bring you new localised payment methods faster and more securely. You’ll notice the payment fields look and are slightly different vs. before. The card number, cvv and expiry date fields are now separated – and a new country field will show on all plans – this country filled is used by Stripe for additional verification to combat fraud and reduce instances of failed payments. This will automatically detect your customer’s country and be pre-filled.

• Google Pay, Apple Pay are now available for all plan and payment types – previously they were only available for one-time payments. They also work with or without custom fields, giving your customers more options.
• Alipay is now available for eligible one-time payments
• iDEAL (popular in the Netherlands) is now available and will automatically display for eligible customers for one-time payments

The new payment fields also dynamically adjust to show the payment methods most likely to convert based on a customer’s location, browser and many other factors – this is based on the billions of transactions Stripe has analysed and processed so far.

Discount codes (coupon codes) have been one of the most requested features in Paythen. We’re excited to launch discount codes for all plan types in Paythen. As with anything else in Paythen, discount codes are super easy to create, manage and use. Try them out now in your Paythen dashboard or read more about how to set them up and how they work across different plans here.

Supercharge your workflow by sending Paythen data to over 3,000 apps with Zapier – including Slack, Gmail, Google Sheets & more. Our Zapier app is currently in an open beta. You won’t see it in the Zapier app list but you can add it to your Zapier account via this link.

Read more about some popular workflows and integrations here.

If you have plans with hundreds or thousands of customers, or just have a lot of customers, loading the plans and customers pages could take a little while…

We’ve completely re-worked how these are displayed so they load way faster than before – with the difference noticeable if you open the plans page, the customers page, or plan reports with 200+ customers. We’re constantly optimising Paythen under the hood to make things faster and better for you and your customers.

Many customers use their Stripe accounts to run advanced reports and other automations. We’ve improved the description we pass into your Stripe account for each payment. This now includes a unique plan ID which never changes for each plan. You’ll see a unique ID like this: project_management_fundamentals_3ydwf2addx_plan This is automatically generated by Paythen when you create a new plan and never changes. This makes it easier to identify payments for specific plans in your Stripe dashboard.

Our Zapier app is now available on request and will let you send Paythen customer data into all your other systems – from your CRM, to Google Sheets and lots more. It’s currently in an open beta – which means anyone can use it but you won’t be able to see it in the Zapier app store yet (that’s coming soon too).

If you’d like access to our Zapier app now, just email hello@paythen.co or let us know via the chat icon below and we’ll send you a link with access.

Paythen now supports a better, easier Apple Pay & Google Pay experience for your customers. You just need to switch Apple Pay to “On” in your Paythen settings, and no action is needed for Google Pay. Your customers will see the Apple Pay or Google Pay buttons for one-time payments (support for recurring plans is coming soon) automatically when they’re on a device that supports it. Read more about how it works here.

Scheduled payments can often fail – new cards, expired cards, insufficient funds, and more. Till now, this meant manually checking customer records in Stripe and spending time and effort chasing customers. Paythen makes this completely hassle-free and fully automated by sending your customers failed payment notifications every time an attempt fails. This email includes a handy link to update their card details.

You, or other admins on your Paythen account can choose to be notified too. You can toggle these settings via your Paythen dashboard.

Read more about failed payments in Paythen.

Paythen makes it easy to offer plans in any currency you want. However having different currencies can make it harder for you to understand reports and compare different plans with each other. Paythen now makes this way easier for you.

If you have a plan that’s not in your base currency, we’ll automatically show you converted values in plan level reports as well as on your dashboard so you can more easily understand how your plans are performing.

Read more about currency conversions in Paythen.

Till now, plan level reports were only available for the Pay your way and Payment plan product types. Now you can get the key insights you need for all 4 plan types in Paythen. The reports are available for all existing and new plans you create. Quickly see the key metrics for your plans as well as a pre-filtered view showing customers on the plan for easier administration.