Most readers of this site will know about the excellent contact form plugin Gravity forms. It is a premium plugin that allows you to collect information from your site visitors, but did you also know it can be used to take payments with gravity forms for products or services?
How It Works
When a site visitors goes to send a message to you via a form, you can add a payment option. You can add one – off payments, a drop down list of different amounts or even setup a subscription.
You can embed a credit card payment form into your gravity form or use a service like paypal where you would collect form details then send them to Paypal for payments.
Here is an example form with a single payment for $99.
Uses
How would you use this functionality I hear you ask, here are some examples:
Subscriptions – you can setup a subscription payment via gravity forms, for example I could setup a subscription for my maintenance service via a form using gravity forms so each month a payment is taken for this service.
Donations – take donations for you not for profit organisation, along with your donators name and address
Payment for services – you could add a drop down on services people can buy from you, payment is taken when the form asking for that service is submitted.
E-commcerce – for a smaller e-commerce setup with a limited number of products you could use gravity forms, but I would opt for something like Woocommerce for bigger stores.
Pay to submit – if the form adds an entry to a directory or allows people to add content to your site you could charge them before the content is submitted.
Payment Gateways
Gravity form integrates with a number of different payment gateways including:
- Authorize.net
- Stripe
- Paypal – standard and pro (pro is where you can take payments on your site).
These add-ons come with the development license for gravity forms.
Remember HTTPS
If you are planning to capture credit card information on your own site, remember you will need to install an SSL certificate on your site so the details are encrypted before being sent to your payment gateway, see your host for details of SSL certificated.
Wrap Up – Payments With Gravity Forms
Gravity form is much more than just a contact form, it can take payments, do surveys, add content, register users, the list goes on, GF is one of my all time favourite plugins and I use it on all the sites we build.