Your new Woocommerce store is installed and ready with all your products to sell, but how are you gonna accept payments?

In this guide I’ll show you how to integrate your WordPress Woocommerce website with PayPal, eWay and Stripe. Along the way I’ll also share a few pointers that’ll help you make informed decisions on how you want to manage your store.

By default, the payment options that your customers will get are PayPal and Cash on Delivery.

Available payment options that come with WordPress’s Woocommerce

• BACS
• Cheque Payments
• Cash on Delivery
• PayPal

I’ll spare you the vocabulary lesson, but “BACS” means “bank transfer”, so if your customer chooses to pay with this option they’ll be supplied with your bank details so they can wire the funds into your bank account.

Now are of all these payment options enough? …Nah! At least not for most store-owners that I’ve had. In this day and age the sole purpose of having an online store is passive income, to make money while you sleep! The first three options will implicate more administration time, you’ll have to wait for the payment to arrive on your bank account before you can process the order.

Choosing your payment options

Just a few things to understand when choosing your payment options, because it’s in your best interest to make the checkout process quick and easy for your customers.

• Provide multiple payment options, checkout the 4th row of this infographic, after offering free shipping and getting your ETA’s accurate, respondents said that having a few payment options will encourage them to complete the checkout process.
• Less steps the better, imagine that you’re in a cafe and you wanna buy a coffee, but you can’t have it until you finish filling out the form… and not until you finish verifying your identification… and not until you’ve filled our a survey… and not until you’ve filled our another form so the cafe can subscribe you to all their promotional emails … – you get the idea!

PayPal

Advantages of offering PayPal

• The whole world is familiar with it, hence the whole world trusts it.
• Guest checkout is available, you don’t need a PayPal account in order to Pay.
• You can also use PayPal for a whole range of services besides payment processing, such as invoicing and POS

Disadvantages of offering PayPal

• PayPal redirects you out of the store to the PayPal site.
• Creating a PayPal account involves a couple of verification steps.
• PayPal tech support in my experience is OK. It’s much of like Apple where you will have to go through a series of steps before you qualify for a support technician to call you. This is because PayPal wants you to go through their docs first.

Creating a PayPal account

• Signing up for a PayPal account is really easy. Once you start the signup process, have your bank detail and credit card details ready and then you’ll be done in a minute.
• Once you’ve created your account, you’ll get verification emails
• PayPal will deposit money into your bank account, and then you have to reimburse the money as part of their verification procedures.

As you can see, I’ve got 4 steps left to complete before I can start using PayPal.

Setting up with PayPal

PayPal is already built into your Woocommerce store, all you gotta do is access your API credentials (username and password), so Woocommerce will connect to your PayPal account.

1. Login to you PayPal account
2. Go to Profile and settings
   
3. Then go to Selling Tools, then API Access.
4. 
   Once you’ve landed on the “API Access” page, under “Pre-built payment solution”, go to Add or edit API permissions
5. Click on Option 2 – Request API credentials to create your own API username and password.
6. When you access this page, click on Show to review the keys
7. Now login to your WP admin of your woocommerce store
8. Go to Woocommerce, then Settings, then Checkout
9. Go to PayPal and check enable PayPal standard
   
10. And at the bottom you can see where to stick in your API credentials!

Stripe

Advantages of offering Stripe

• It’s easy to create a Stripe account
• Stripe doesn’t redirect customers away from your store
• Stripe’s prices are more competitive than PayPal

Disadvantages of offering Stripe

• …I haven’t found any yet, but I will update this post once I do!

Creating a Stripe account

Just like PayPal the signing up to Stripe is easy, except for Stripe you’ll also need to provide an ABN and/or ACN number.

Setting up with Stripe

In order to do this you’ll need to;

1. Have an SSL installed on your web server.
2. Upload and activate the Woocommerce Stripe plugin – it’s free!
3. Access the API credentials
   
   

   As you can see in this screenshot, you can easily find these API details by going to “API” in the left-hand menu.

4. and then stick ’em in your settings
   
   

   Note: Stripe comes with a testing platform, in order to turn this off and enter the live credentials obviously just uncheck the appropriate field.

eWay

Advantages of offering eWay

• eWay is known worldwide and trusted worldwide.
• eWay now offers competitive pricing.

Disadvantages of offering eWay

• Depending on where you get your eWay account (whether it’s through another banking institution), creating an eWay account can undergo a strict approval process. You’re website will have to meet a range of criterion (eg. SSL certificate, certain details specifying on how your ship your products, details on your privacy policy etc.) However client’s I’ve had in the past found that creating and eWay account directly through eWay to be quick and painless.
• The eWay plugin costs $99 a year

Setting up with eWay

In order to do this you’ll need to;

1. Upload and activate the Woocommerce eWay plugin
2. Access the API credentials
3. and then stick ’em in your settings

Last modified: July 8, 2018