How to accept recurring payments with Wufoo

BLOG_Story1_paymentsHey there Wufoo fans! Now as most of you know, you can collect payments with Wufoo forms. But did you know that you’re not just limited to one time payments? With Wufoo, you have the option of collecting recurring payments as well. That’s right, we’re just that cool.

But what if you want to collect both recurring and one time payments for the same form? That’s where it can get a bit tricky. With our current integration, it’s not possible to collect both types of payments on the same form.

Lucky for you though, we’re form experts over here. We’ll show you how to do this using three forms (it’s not bad, I promise) while making it seamlessly look like a single form to your users.

You’ll accomplish this thanks to a landing page.

Step 1: Create your 3 Forms

So, just so we can paint a clear picture–let’s say you’re collecting donations for your non-profit organization. You want to give your donors the option of either making a one time donation or making recurring donations. The first thing you’ll do is create your landing page form with that one question:

landing_page

Now you’ll want to create two separate additional forms: one form for the one time donations and one form for the recurring donations.

donation_forms

Pro tip: if you need to collect all the same info on the forms, consider creating one and then duplicating it to create the second. You’ll cut down on your form building time.

Step 2: Connect the forms

To seamlessly connect these forms, we’ll visit our lovely friends, the Form Rules. Specifically, we’ll set up a couple redirects on our landing page form to take the user to payment forms.

rules_donation_forms

And you’re all set–you can start collecting donations.

But wait a minute…we forgot a little something.

Step 3: Setting up Payment Integration

You can’t really collect donations without Payment Integration, now can you? Well here’s how you’ll do that. Since the landing page form just sends the person to a separate form, you can leave that form’s Payment Integration alone. But you will need to set that up for both the recurring donation form and the one time donation form.

For the one time donation form — You can set up this Payment Integration just like any other one time payment form. Select your merchant, edit your settings, and add the donation price field to your Assign Prices section. All our merchants (except Chargify) will let you collect one time payments.

Next step? You’ll set that up for the recurring donation form with one of our recurring payment merchants–there are three to choose from:

Stripe Subscription
PayPal Standard
Chargify

To make things easy on yourself, we recommend using Stripe or PayPal Standard. Since you can collect recurring payments and one-time payments with the same merchant account, this will allow you to keep all donation in one merchant account.

Just like that, you’ve got a landing page form to help you collect both recurring and one-time donations. For those people filling out your form, it will appear as if it’s one seamless form.

See for yourself.

As always, let us know if you have questions or comments!

Comments

  • The problem is that we can’t make limited recurring payments. For example, we often want to make it possible for people to pay for a retreat over four payments. Or we would like people to be able to pay monthly for a one-year program we offer. There’s no way to specify either the number of payments or a stop date for the recurring payments.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Peg Syverson.
  • Is there anyway I can pass information filled in on the first form(i.e. what you call the landing page) to the second one?

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Brian Read.
  • I second Peg’s sentiment. That is a kind of recurring payment that would be helpful to me. To be able to make an up-front deposit type of payment, and then make a limited number of payments over the next few weeks/month to fully pay for an event. Let me know if anyone figures out a good way to do this.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Ryan Weiss.
  • Would this work for annual payments, like annual dues for a nonprofit membership organization?

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Nanette.
  • Agree with Peg and Ryan. I sell product that can be paid for over instalments, usually up to 3 months. It would good to have a way of setting a limit.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Mark Kreling.
  • This mentions “PayPal Standard.” The integration we have used for years with wufoo is PayPal Website Payments Pro. Even though this is a higher level of PayPal service, is this article saying I cannot set up recurring monthly payments?

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Eric.
  • Hello. This is wonderful news. Authorize.net allows recurring payment using other web form providers. Is it an oversight that they are not on the merchant list?

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by eli.
  • Agree with many of these comments- we too use Authorize and would love to set up a system for an initial set deposit, and spreading the balance (variable depending on program) across the next 6 months. Eager to hear if that is an option

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Jen Z.
  • @ Peg & Ryan: For Paypal Standard, you can do that by specifying the period of time between payments in the Payment settings for your form in wufoo. For Stripe Subscription, the period is set on Stripe’s end. For both Paypal and Stripe Subscription, the end date is set by logging in to the payment processor and defining it from there.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Cody Curry.
  • @Brian Definitely, I can recommend checking out our URL Modification to see if it fits the bill!

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Cody Curry.
  • Does this recurring form work with Authorize.net? We currently use another processor for recurring donations, but would love to switch to wufoo and use our Authorize.net account instead.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Peter.
  • I agree with Eric. We pay extra for PayPal Pro so we can process credit cards on our website without people backing out of a donation because they don’t want to create a PayPal account. We NEED recurring payments as well as to give people a choice in how they pay. Please add recurring payments to the other PayPal integrations. This is a big enough deal for us we may have to switch forms programs if we can’t get this working.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Amy Smith.
  • Shoot. It looks like this can’t do one of the things I am asked about most often — a system for annual dues for a non-profit membership, where the user doesn’t have to fill out the form completely each year.

    I am not sure how many people want to authorize recurring payments indefinitely for years in advance!
    But, good to know for future reference.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Gwen.
  • @Peter Currently recurring payments are available through Paypal Standard, Stripe Subscription, and Chargify. While Authorize.net does have this feature, it’s not something that’s been included in our integration presently.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Cody Curry.
  • @Amy I can definitely understand the need to offer multiple options for your donors. One option would be to take a look at our Stripe Subscription integration, as this would not require them to create an account to set up a recurring donation.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Cody Curry.
  • @Cody, Is the recurring payment possible for Authoriz.net yet?

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Able Allen.
  • Has anyone used this for camp registration? I would like to figure out how to have people pay a deposit and set up a payment plan to have the remainder due be run automatically on their card. Possible?

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Keelan Wackman.
  • Can you still do recurring billing on wufoo form as I dont see anywhere to add that on the payment integration page

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Helen Grace.
  • On the recurring donations, if I am understanding correctly we send the donor a donation form every month. Wufoo does not keep a record of the cc numbers to auto process each month.

    Posted September 24th, 2016 by Paula Jaillet.

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