Stripe Payment Link

When you run an online business, quite often you want to build a payment mechanism, so users can pay for your hard work. Having a site on Webflow allows you to make use of its ecommerce functionality. After the latest Webflow Membership updates, you can also configure recurring payments. 

Sometimes though, Webflow e-commerce plans are not the best solution. They can get quite pricey and may break your profitability. They are also dedicated to online stores, so if you’re not really running one, its functionalities may not provide you with as much flexibility as you may need.

What do you do, then, if you have your own Webflow website, plan on selling something, and do not want to go for full-featured e-commerce solutions?

Here comes Stripe Payment Link as a good alternative.

Let’s say you just wrote an e-book or recorded a new video course, and you want to make some money out of it. (Or improve your visitors’ motivation, as people are more likely to finish a book or course once they paid for it.)

Or perhaps a part of your project is hidden behind a paywall (let’s say, you run a premium resource hub). You can build marketing around this without any additional, but in the end you want to let people pay you for accessing this space. 

Let’s add another idea. You created a premium Slack/Facebook community, and the idea is that you let people join after they pay for the access (or buy a recurring subscription).

Another interesting use case is that you’ve just come up with a product or campaign idea and you need to set the whole sales process up as soon as possible. You know that there is demand for your product, but you can’t afford to waste time creating a whole online store. You simply need to be able to start accepting payments as soon as possible.

Stripe Payment Link can help you with all of this and more. How is that?

The general idea is that you can create a marketing landing page or a simple website and place a “buy now” button there.

You can share the link to such a page as many times as you want – on social media, in emails, or anywhere where your audience could find you.

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The implementation takes the following parts:

1. setting up your payment link in a Stripe dashboard 
2. integrating it within your Webflow project.

Below you’ll find all the steps you need to take.

Stripe set-up:

1. Set up your Stripe account

No rocket science here. You create a Stripe account as a sole proprietor, company, or NGO. Then, you add your bank account details and product category (needed in order for Stripe to calculate tax settings). Notice that you can enable two-factor authentication – needless to say, we recommend doing just so for security reasons.

2. Create a product or subscription and set its price

Go to https://dashboard.stripe.com/products. Create a new product, name it, and set its price. If you’d like, you can add product image and description to enhance your page’s look.

There are a few handy payment features for you to consider. Apart from standard pricing, you can select package pricing (if you want to sell your product in bundles) or volume pricing (the more your buyers buy, the less they pay for one item). As you may have guessed, you can make use of pricing features to attract customers with special offers.

It’s possible to set up either one time payment or recurring payment – if you sell subscriptions to your services, you might be interested in the latter. Another interesting idea is that there are a lot of billing period options. Remember that example with online communities and selling memberships? No matter how often you want to charge for membership, Stripe’s billing period options are here to assist. See below – there are a lot of billing periods to choose from:

You can dive even deeper into pricing models here. 

Speaking of prices, in case you’re interested in international sales and face some tricky taxation stuff, check out Stripe Tax.

3. Set up checkout

Now that your product and its price are ready, it’s time to get your payment page live.

Go to this creator to start the setup. Add your product and confirm its price. 

Keep in mind that the checkout is on Stripe domain, and you have just a little control over the styles or code. But still, there are a lot of options on how you can set your checkout. You can, for example:

• add a logo or an icon
• customize fonts, buttons, and background
• add custom texts
• configure return and refund policies
• collect a terms of service agreement
• include a place for putting a promo code.

If you need any additional info (e.g. you ship your products and need a shipping address), remember to set up a field where you ask a buyer to provide appropriate details. In this particular example, you’d better also set up shipping options (for example, which countries you deliver to and at what shipping rates) to avoid misunderstandings. Just go through all the fields and decide for yourself which ones apply to your business.

Remember to decide what happens once the payment is processed. Your customers can either be shown the confirmation page, or redirected to a page specified by you. First and foremost, it would be great to thank the customers for making the purchase. Secondly, leaving your customers without any clue whether their payment has been processed is not the wisest thing to do. Decide what they might need now to get the best user experience and show them the information they might find useful. Perhaps include a link to an interesting piece of content related to the product? Or an appropriate page where they can learn more about their just-bought subscription service?

Once you’re finished, click the blue button in the top right corner (Create Link). You will be redirected to the payment links section in your dashboard.

4. Configure Buy Button

If you see a ready-to-use payment link like the one below, it means that everything went well:

You now have the checkout page you can link to. Let’s now create a Buy button and embed it on your website.

If you’d like you can enhance the button look here. Have a look at a few examples below:

Once you’re satisfied with your button’s look, copy the code you need to add the button to your website. Remember to copy the code generated for your own button – the one below is just an example.

Webflow set-up:

4. Add custom HTML to your project

Enter your website project, go to the elements panel, and choose the embed element widget. Place it on your website and paste the custom HTML in the appropriate section. As for now, there will be just a placeholder on your project, but your button will appear once you publish or export your site.

One huge benefit (and the main use case for Stripe Links) is that you don’t need to build any complex applications for payment processing to start selling. If you’ve just started running a small business and don’t have the resources to maintain a whole website, it looks like you can consider using Stripe Link.

You also don’t need to worry about either payment methods or translation of the checkout page. Stripe Link comes with over 20 payment method, including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. It also matches your customer’s browser language (over 30 languages, to be precise).

When you buy something online, it’s best not to send your money to someone who doesn’t seem reliable. It’s crucial especially if you sell in a subscription model. Stripe’s PCI-certified, which means that it provides you with a secure payment system to store your clients’ billing info. Thanks to that, your clients know that you make use of trustworthy payment features.

Here’s a link to documentation if you want to learn more about stripe payment links or need to access additional options.

We hope you’ve found this article helpful, and that you’re now ready to launch your own Stripe Payment links!