WooPayments: Startup Guide

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Thanks for choosing WooPayments! 

We provide an integrated payments solution to get your WooCommerce store up and running quickly without setup costs or monthly fees. With WooPayments, you’ll get:

• Credit and debit card acceptance
• Local payment method offerings
• Automated payouts to your bank account
• Buy now, pay later payment methods
• Built-in multi-currency support
• Easy integration of popular digital wallets

Managing payments — including refunds, disputes, and payouts — is integrated into your site’s WordPress administrator dashboard, so it all happens from within your site’s admin dashboard.

First, let’s make sure you have what’s required to ensure a smooth installation:

• Your business is based in one of our supported countries.
• PHP, WordPress, and WooCommerce are on recent versions.
• Your site has an SSL certificate and is accessible over HTTPS.
• You are at least 18 years old.

Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins to see if WooPayments is already installed. If it is, great! Scroll down to the Signing Up section and continue from there.

If it’s not listed, please follow the instructions in the Installation section below.

To install WooPayments:

1. Go to Plugins > Add New on your WordPress site.
2. In the search box, type “WooPayments” and hit Enter on your keyboard.
3. One of the first results will be WooPayments by Automattic.

4. Click the Install Now button to begin installation on your site. Once installation is complete, the Install Now button will change to Activate.

5. Click the Activate button.

After clicking Activate, you will be taken to the setup page to start creating your account.

After you’ve installed and activated WooPayments, it’s time to start the sign up process.

Before starting the sign up process, keep the following information in mind:

• Although most of the signup process takes place on your site, there will be a popup shown from connect.stripe.com (Stripe is our payments partner) that collects your phone number and email address. This popup is normal.
• If you want to try out WooPayments first, without entering real personal or business information, please use sandbox mode. This includes agencies or developers setting up WooPayments on behalf of a client.
• Be sure to select the correct country for your account, as it cannot be changed later. If you’re using WooPayments for a business, the relevant country is the one where your business is registered, not the one in which you personally live.

To sign up for WooPayments: 

1. Go to Payments and click the Connect your store button.

2. Enter your email address to connect to your WordPress.com account.
   • If you don’t have an existing WordPress.com account, that’s fine! We’ll create one for you after you enter your email address. All you need to do is click the link in the verification email we send.
   • Your WordPress.com account email will be used for most WooPayments notifications. If you don’t want such emails going to that address, it might be best to create a new WordPress.com account solely for connecting your WooPayments site.

3. Provide the required business information.

4. Verify your business details with our payments partner, Stripe.

5. After you click the Add information button, a popup from connect.stripe.com will appear, asking for your phone number and email address. This is a normal part of the account creation process.
6. Once you’ve added your phone number and email address, and verified your phone number, you’ll start entering your business details.

7. After you’ve entered all your details, and clicked Agree and submit, you will be taken back to the WordPress dashboard. Signup is now complete!

This short video shows how you can use WooPayments after you’ve signed up.

If you’ve made a mistake while signing up for a WooPayments account and wish to start fresh, you can either:

• Request your account be deleted, or…
• Reset the signup process.

To reset the signup process:

1. Return to your site’s admin dashboard by clicking the Cancel link during signup.
2. Navigate to Payments in your administrator dashboard.
3. Select the Reset account option in the Account details.
4. Confirm you’d like to reset by clicking the Yes, reset account button.

Running the latest versions of both WooCommerce and WooPayments is a crucial part of keeping your site secure. We suggest enabling automatic updates for both plugins on the Plugins > Installed Plugins page.

You can learn more about auto-updating plugins on this WordPress.org page.

Once you’ve finished signing up, go to the Payments > Settings section of your WordPress dashboard. This is where you can configure WooPayments. 

First, make sure WooPayments is enabled by checking the Enable WooPayments box. If you want to test WooPayments before taking any real payments, you can do that by also checking the Enable test mode box.

Test mode lets you simulate transactions using test card numbers so that you can ensure your checkout process is working as expected. Simply put any product in the cart and go through the checkout process and the order confirmation page to see exactly what customers would see during an actual purchase.

When you’re ready to go live, remember to disable test mode before accepting live payments. 

In the Payments accepted on checkout section, you’ll see that by default you are already able to take credit and debit card payments:

By checking the boxes for other payment methods, you can also offer additional payment options to certain customers. Offering these payment methods can increase the chance that visitors to your site will purchase from your store.

This section contains buy now, pay later payment (BNPL) methods. These can help boost sales by offering customers more buying power and flexible payment options.

Please see our BNPL documentation to learn more about these payment methods.

This section shows features which enable even faster checkouts. Enabling these can boost your sales and reduce abandoned carts, as they make it easier for customers to complete their purchase. WooPayments currently supports WooPay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Link by Stripe.

The Transactions section controls how your checkout works. Here you can configure whether to allow customers to save their card information on your site and how a charge from your site will appear on your customers’ bank statements. You can also add some contact information, which will appear on receipts and emails from your site.

The Payouts section lets you to control how often WooPayments pays out your earnings into your bank account.

Our Fraud protection feature offers rules with which you can block suspicious orders before they get placed. This can help you avoid carding attacks and increased disputes.

We suggest most stores use the Basic risk level, but to learn more about this feature, please consult our dedicated page on the fraud protection rules.

Now that you’re up and running with WooPayments, you can learn more about managing your money and the various settings available to you. After that, feel free to explore some of the more advanced functionality our plugin has to offer!

Our preventing disputes guide can be especially help to review, since it contains some important suggestions about what contact information, policies, and other details you should have on your site.

Here are a few simple things you can do to ensure you have the best experience with WooPayments:

• Try to stay on the latest version of WooCommerce and WooPayments. This helps you avoid bugs and security issues that could disrupt your store!
• Consult the WooCommerce self-service guide for help solving the most common issues merchants sometimes experience with their sites and stores. 

If you need help, don’t worry! WooPayments is supported by our worldwide team of Happiness Engineers. Please contact us via the Support tab in your account dashboard, where we can assist over live chat (when available) or email.