Online course: How to plan, run and grow your own donut business from home

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.

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.

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.