Streamline your billing process with this comprehensive guide on sending payment requests directly from your WooCommerce-powered website. This tutorial walks you through the entire workflow, from the initial setup in the WordPress admin dashboard to the final customer confirmation.
Video Transcript
In this video, we'll see how you can use your website to send a request for payment to a customer.
First, we'll navigate to the WooCommerce area in the left side menu where we see an item labeled request payment.
The system will now march us through a small wizard, three or four pages long, which will help us fill out the request for payment and deliver it to the customer.
In the first page of the wizard, you select which of your employees is going to be sending that request.
Next, you select which customer is going to receive the request for payment.
If the customer does not yet have an account, you can create an account for them.
You will need an email address in order to create a new account.
In this step of the wizard, you enter an invoice number.
You can create this invoice number in any way you want.
Typically, it would come from your accounting system or from your POS system.
You then enter in the amount that's owed on the invoice.
You can also specify whether or not to add sales taxes on top of the amount you have entered.
And lastly, if you choose to, you can select a PDF file of that invoice.
The customer will receive a link to download a PDF invoice as part of the email that the customer receives.
In the final step of the wizard, you can see the text of the email that the system is about to send to the customer.
Here is the information about the customer receiving the email, and here is the body of the email that the customer's going to receive.
In the email body, where it says request detail, will be replaced by this information up here.
And very importantly, at the bottom of that email will be a button with text pay now.
After we hit the button send, the system will send the email to the customer.
Here, we're going to switch gears for a second and we will see what the customer receives.
Here is the email account of that customer to whom we just sent the request for payment.
This is the email that the customer receives requesting the payment.
Inside this email, we see the customer's name, the invoice number, and the amount requested.
Also, here is the link for the customer to download the invoice PDF that we uploaded when we prepared the request.
If a customer wants a hard copy of the invoice, they can click the link and download the invoice.
Most importantly, at the bottom of the invoice, there is a button labeled pay now.
In most cases, the customer will recognize that this request for payment is valid and will click the pay now button.
When the customer clicks the button pay now, the customer will be redirected to the final page of the payment process in your website.
The site knows which customer is making the payment and data for the invoice number and amount are already filled in.
Here is the amount requested, 99 dollars.
The only action required for the customer is to enter their credit card information and complete the payment.
From the customer's side, it is a very simple flow.
The customer clicks the button pay now, they're taken to this very last page of the checkout process where they enter their credit card information, then complete the payment.
It is worth mentioning that when a customer makes a payment to you as part of a request payment, you will receive an email from the system.
Now, we're going to switch back to the admin pages to show off one or two final things.
After you request payment from a customer, the website stores the history of the requests for payment that have been sent out.
In this request payment history page, we can see all the requests sent, and for each request, we see the customer and amount requested.
In this column, you can see whether each request was paid for or not.
For example, this row corresponds to the payment that we just made as part of this video.
Here we see that this one has been marked as paid.
The system actually created a new order in your site specifically to handle this payment.
If any payment has not been made, you can hit a button resend email.
You can also duplicate a request for payment, if you need to change the amount or modify the original request for payment.
Your website can be an extremely useful tool for sending out requests for payment to customers.
When the customer receives such a request, it is a very fast and simple process for the customer to make a payment to you.