When a customer signs up to a payment plan, they get an automated email confirming their dates and key information regarding their plan. You can now customize this with additional context, links and emoji 🎉
You can add this custom text at a company level via email settings so it applies to all plans, or you can enable / overwrite it for specific plans within the plan settings. This email is only sent to payment plan customers (for all payment plan types, but not subscriptions or one-off payments). For Pay your way plans, it is only sent to customers that choose the payment plan option.
Your custom text is shown in addition to the default information in the email. This can be useful for introducing customers to the process, next steps, reiterate terms or highlight the support channels available.
You can also add custom text at the company or plan level for the upcoming payment reminder email that is sent two days before each scheduled payment plan or subscription payment.
This lets you add relevant context at different points of a customer’s payment plan lifecycle and tailor the text to suit the situation better (new customer) vs. upcoming payment and you can also better highlight plan-specific variables by setting it at a plan level. Eg: You can use the upcoming payment reminder custom text to let people know what happens if their payment fails, remind them they can pay early, and more!
You can now let customers choose their upfront payment amount at checkout. They can pay 20%, 50%, or any other amount immediately and the rest over easy installments. You can set a minimum and maximum payment amount, either as a fixed amount or a percentage of the cart total. This, combined with the existing option to let customers choose the number of installments, gives your customers maximum flexibility while ensuring they follow your pre-set rules.
Flexible payment plans help you sell more since customers can now tailor their payment plans for their cashflow and budget. This functionality is available in our WooCommerce plugin v0.9.1 and higher (download the latest version here) and works with both standard and blocks-based checkouts.
In your Paythen plugin settings, you will see the new options you can enable to switch this on and customize it to suit your business:
This further enhances flexibility and effectiveness for you and your customers, adding to the granular customizations you can already make to offer payment plans just how you need.
Till now, you could only add terms that customers had to agree to for payment plan and subscription options. For pay your way plans, there was no option to require customers to view and agree to your terms if they chose the pay in full option. Now you can choose to require terms acceptance for either the pay in full or the payment plan option, or for both options in your pay your way plans.
You can activate this on any existing plans you have by editing them and toggling the terms option to “Both payment options” and for new plans you can choose to show terms for either or both options. This helps you be more clear about your policies including how you handle cancellations, refunds and more, regardless of the payment option the customer chooses.
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.
Get an Offer email sent to you to see how this works via our demo plan, or get started now via the new “Offers” menu item in your Paythen dashboard with our step-by-step instructions.
Offers is an easy (and automated) way to encourage repeat business from customers and drive more sales. You can set up as many offers as needed and start driving repeat sales now.
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.