If you are a BigCommerce customer, there are many benefits of integrating with PayWhirl, including recurring payments & billing, stored customer credit cards, layaway plans, pre-orders, custom invoicing, subscriptions, membership content, and many other uses cases.
BigCommerce doesn't support subscriptions or stored credit cards in their native cart or checkout process, but you can use PayWhirl to add this functionality to your online store. When a customer completes a purchase through a PayWhirl widget, their address and credit card info will be stored in the gateway you connect to both the customer and/or you, the admin, can use it again if needed.
Customers can also return and login to their "customer portal" to manage their information, cards on file, etc. (this can be disabled if you want). The customer portal is typically embedded directly into the existing BigCommerce "My Account" section of your website, so customers are unaware there are two different systems. Or you can use the hosted version of your customer portal if you don't want to integrate the two systems. Either way, customers can also use the same login credentials on both PayWhirl and BigCommerce.
Once customers log in, they have a place to purchase subscriptions, and they can purchase additional products in PayWhirl with their saved info, all without ever leaving your website.
If you already have products in BigCommerce, you can continue using the existing cart checkout.
Note: Our cart system is separate from the one built into BigCommerce. We cannot import items or complete a checkout that begins in the BigCommerce cart...
In a nutshell, the process works like this:
Connect to BigCommerce / install app
Create a payment plan(s)
Create a payment widget(s)
Create a BigCommerce page(s) for each widget (or product pages)
Embed your widget(s) into BigCommerce page(s) by copying / pasting embed codes into your pages / product pages.
Connect and Activate Live Payment Gateway.
Note: By default, every widget is connected to the Test Gateway and doesn't store or charge credit cards. To begin accepting live payments, make sure to connect a gateway to each widget that is embedded in your site. Also, make sure to change the customer portal settings page.
Install the app
Once you have the PayWhirl App installed, you can now create payment plans for use with BigCommerce. You will see new options on the plan settings page to help you control how orders flow into BigCommerce after successful payments. Orders are generated based on your plan settings. Note: You will need to create a plan or upsell for every product/service you want to sell through PayWhirl.
Setup payment widget(s) and/or payment forms
After you have connected PayWhirl to your BigCommerce store and created your payment plan(s), you will need to create payment widgets or forms so your customers can check out securely on your site. When you set up your payment widgets) you will choose which plans to display in each widget. After you save your widget(s), you will receive an embed code (a few lines of code) that you can then to copy/paste into BigCommerce.
Note: We offer two different types of embed codes per widget. Embedded widgets (customer check out in the page) and "buy button" widgets (that popup checkout over the page for customers)Create a page(s) / product page(s) in BigCommerce for your widgets -
Once you have your embed codes for your widgets or buy buttons, you can proceed with pasting the code into the HTML of any page or product page within BigCommerce.
Select HTML icon on Bigcommerce Page or Product
Use the HTML input method on the WYSIWYG editor by clicking the icon that says HTML in the graphical page editor.
Paste the Widget Code into the HTML Source Editor
4. When you are ready to go live, edit the widget, and select the live gateway. Each widget type is a bit different, but towards the bottom, you can click on the advanced settings. Select the live gateway from the drop-down.
If you haven't connected a gateway, check out one of these guides. Stripe is available on all plans, while Braintree and Authorize.net are available on our monthly paid plans).
Each business setup is unique, but typically, BigCommerce customers will set up ONE PAGE in BigCommerce and ONE WIDGET for EACH PRODUCT they want to offer a payment plan on... Then, they will set up however many PLANS they want to offer for each product and build a WIDGET that has all of the PLANS for the specific product. Finally, they will embed the WIDGET into the PAGE they created originally in BigCommerce.
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Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
The PayWhirl Team