Challenge

Like many e-commerce businesses, WooCommerce merchants face multiple challenges, from drop-shipping to ‌complex fulfilment logistics, that require a highly customisable payment plugin solution.

Founded in 2015, Payment Plugins is committed to producing the best payments platform integrations for the widest range of WooCommerce merchants. The company’s plugin allows businesses to customise their payment processing flows and user experiences as they scale.

“Any time we can reduce the friction involved in the payment flow, we're going to go with that option,” said Clayton Rogers, founder and CEO of Payment Plugins.

Solution

Payment Plugins partnered with Stripe in 2019 because it saw the value in Stripe’s scalable and resilient payments infrastructure that can handle large volumes of transactions, allowing businesses to quickly and easily scale their payment processing operations as they expand.

“We immediately saw that our partnership with Stripe was going to be successful because of the quality of Stripe’s code libraries, which greatly assisted our development process,” said Rogers.

Payment Plugins has been using Connect to integrate payments into its platform after previously relying on the manual copying and pasting of API keys to link the WooCommerce store to Stripe. According to Rogers, adopting Connect has given the platform an edge. “We can view log data for our merchants, which is huge in terms of time saving and troubleshooting,” said Rogers. “And it’s also really good for reporting, because we can see the number of successful or failed API calls from the WooCommerce store to Stripe, which is critical. As developers, it allows us to really do a health check on the code that we’re releasing.”

To offer its merchants the ability to provide a fast and personalised checkout, Payment Plugins then chose to implement the Optimised Checkout Suite, which included the Payment Element, multiple payment methods that are dynamically surfaced, and Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout experience that enables customers to manage saved payment details.

Rogers said it made complete sense for Payment Plugins to offer the Optimised Checkout Suite, because it significantly reduces the friction involved in the payment flow. “With the Payment Element, a merchant can render the most relevant payment methods with no extra work,” said Rogers. “It definitely cuts down on buyer confusion.”

Being able to incorporate accepting payments and moving money globally using Stripe’s powerful Payment Methods API and the Optimised Checkout Suite was also important. E-commerce sites would typically have disparate solutions installed to be able to offer multiple payment methods.

“Back then, you might be interacting with five different integration companies like ours for your different payment methods,” said Rogers. “That could become unruly to manage, especially with different codebases interacting. Stripe offers nearly every payment method that you could dream of, so you can stick to one solution for your entire site.”

Results

Enhanced payment method support

As a WooCommerce payment plugin developer, Payment Plugins understood the increasing importance of localisation.

With Stripe, it has implemented 27 different payment methods, including iDEAL, OXXO, GrabPay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Payment Plugins’ merchants can also add most of them with no code through the Payment Element.

Most recently, Payment Plugins added three buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment methods: Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna. These payment methods allow customers to spread out payments over time while the merchant is paid the full amount upfront (minus fees).

A Stripe analysis found that Payment Plugins’ merchants that adopted BNPL saw an average 11% increase in sales and a 10% increase in the number of purchases.

“Buy now, pay later has been huge,” said Rogers. “Let’s say that you’re a business that’s doing a couple million dollars a year – you're talking about maybe making a couple $100,000 more.”

Streamline bank payments

Bank payments offer customers more payment choice and reduce payment failure experienced with expired cards. Incorporating Financial Connections with ACH Direct Debit has helped facilitate Payment Plugins’ expansion, especially within the US market. Instead of having customers manually enter their bank account details and waiting 1-2 days to verify their accounts, Financial Connections allows customers to add their bank accounts and pay without ever leaving the checkout experience.

“With Financial Connections, customers are able to seamlessly connect their bank accounts. The experience is easy and secure, helping us reduce drop-off and convert more users who want to pay by bank,” said Rogers.