Checkout

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.

All our Zapier triggers now include discount code data where relevant for customers that used a discount code. This gives you even more control over how you use Paythen data in your workflow. Discount code data can help you better track specific marketing campaigns or activities, understand their effectiveness and generally see which sales and discounts are the most popular.

Our “New customer”, “Successful payment” and ” Failed payment” triggers now include discount code values including the code used, the type of discount (one-time or ongoing) and the value of the discount (20% off, $50 off, etc).

If you’re not already using our Zapier app, this is a good time to get started. This lets you set up various custom workflows to suit your business, from getting notified in the tool of your choice, like Slack, teams or even text, through to sending Paythen data to your CRM or other systems and even sending custom payment plan links to customers using our Zapier action, there’s a lot of powerful flows you can unlock with Zapier. Get started here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.