Paythen offers two fundamental approaches for setting up payment plans: Templates and Direct Plan Links. Both options allow you to create payment plans, but they are designed for different use cases. Here are the key differences between Direct Plan Links and Templates. You can see some examples here.

A template in Paythen is a set of rules you define which are inherited by any plans created from that template. The main use-case is when each customer's total amount is going to be different (like for WooCommerce, Shopify, other eCommerce, with Zapier, or if you're collecting data via a third party form, then sending people to a payment page).

Eg: When creating a template, you set a specific billing interval (like 10 weekly installments or 6 monthly installments, etc), the number of payments, the plan default currency, and more. When a plan is created from this template, it inherits these values. You can overwrite most values by passing new ones via url parameters.

If you're using our WooCommerce plugin, any values that need to be passed are automatically handled. See detailed WooCommerce setup instructions here.

To create a new template, click on the "Templates" menu item and the "New template" button in your Paythen dashboard or go here directly.

You can choose from four different template types in Paythen:

For most use cases, we recommend either the Flexipay plan template since it's the most flexible for you and your customers (and combines the best of all other plan types), or the standard Payment plan template.

Here are the key differences:

Used when you want to offer customers typical payment plans that have a standard billing interval – weekly, monthly, every 2 weeks, etc.

Used when you want to offer customers maximum flexibility – within your parameters. Eg: With Flexipay, you can offer customers the ability to design their payment plan to suit them – their payment amounts, billing interval and even custom dates, what they pay now vs. later, and even incentivize them to pay in full immediately with a "pay now discount".

All the above operate within rules you set like a minimum upfront payment, a timeframe or date by which all payments must be made, etc.

Used when you want all customers to align to the same dates – eg: Pay $100 or x% on sign up, then 20% on 5 September, 30% on 20 November, etc... This approach is useful if you are selling something that happens at a specific future date – like an event, or a workshop, etc.

Used when you want customers to pay all / some installments first, then receive their product or service. This can either work as a traditional layaway or lay-by plan where customers "reserve" what they want but they only receive it once they have made all payments. This can also be used for preorders, and to control demand when you have limited supply or limited spots (eg: for workshops or events) and you want to encourage some people to wait.

You can do this by offering a "Wait for it" discount - eg: Wait 8 weeks to receive your product and get 10% off, Preorder now and pay in installments while we complete manufacturing to get 25% off.
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Wait for it plans are useful if you want to fully de-risk your payment plan option as they assume customers will complete their payments before they receive their product or service.

You can create as many templates or any type, with as many different rules as you want, giving you full control.

In contrast, direct payment plan links allow for a quicker, predefined setup of payment plans. These links:

Example Use Case: You run a photography business and offer three pre-set packages. You can just create three direct plan links and link them on your site or even share directly with customers, like this example. You can even offer added flexibility by creating Flexipay plan links (like this one) which let you set some key rules but your customers choose their plan structure within that.

To create a direct plan link, click on the green plus icon in the main menu of your Paythen go here. These make sense when you offer a small number of preset services and customers don't buy varying quantities and mixes.

The rest of this article covers how to use templates links.

Once you create a template, we'll show your template link which is what you need to paste into our ecommerce plugins. You can also use this template link in other scenarios like in a custom integration, or via any third party tools like form builders, to pass values to it via url parameters. Here is an example using JotForm but the same principle applies to any form builders. This will automatically generate and display a payment plan for your customers on the fly.

Use this demo link below and paste it into your browser – you can change the name and price fields below and you will see that it will generate a payment plan based on whatever you enter:
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​https://demo.paythen.co/template/qyl3kogwn1?price=1000&plan_name=Paythen+Demo+Payment+Plan
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You can change the price above to anything you want and then paste it into your browser. This will create a new plan with that price as the total. This template creates a plan that has 10 weekly installments. When you create a template, you can choose the billing interval, number of payments, add a surcharge, upfront deposit and more. You can see the additional parameters you can pass to a template link below.

If you're using our WooCommmerce plugin, you can ignore all of the information below as it happens automatically once you've installed our plugin. Read more about our WooCommerce plugin and setup instructions here.

If you're interested in using Paythen with Shopify, read more here.

There are many default dynamic values you can pass to template links giving you a lot of control over plans that are generated this way. Plan name (plan_name) and the total payment amount (price) are the only two that are required.
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We are often expanding this, and some values vary by template type so this article can sometimes be out of date vs the actual parameters available. Up to date available parameters and their IDs will show on your template summary page in your Paythen dashboard once you create a template.
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Eg: ​https://demo.paythen.co/template/qyl3kogwn1?price=1000&plan_name=Paythen+Demo+Payment+Plan

REQUIRED

Plan name (required)

Field ID: plan_name

Total payment amount (required)

Field ID: price

OPTIONAL

Plan description (optional)

Field ID: description

Currency (optional)

Field ID: currency

Billing interval (optional)

Field ID: billing_interval

Number of payments (optional)

Field ID: number_of_payments

Start payments after (optional)

Field ID: start_payments_after

Custom confirmation page (optional)

Field ID: customer_redirect_url

In addition to the above, Flexipay templates offer even more granularity and control with these additional optional values you can pass via url parameters:

You can see and copy the field IDs directly via your template summary page.

In addition to these, you can also pass values to any custom fields you added when creating the template. Eg: If you added a custom field called Mobile phone in your template, then that can be passed as a value also.

Mobile phone

Field ID: mobile_phone

eg: mobile_phone=(213) 123 4567

Any values you pass here automatically overwrite any pre-set values you might have entered in the template. Eg: If you had set a description in the template, but you pass a new value for description in the url, we will use the new value in the plan. Or if you've set a default currency to USD but then pass a currency value as EUR then the plan will be generated with Euro as the currency.

If you're not sure about how you can pass values in the url, read our help article about utm parameters here.

Eg: A template url can have the above values appended to it in this format. Here is an example with 5 parameters. You can pass some or all of the values, as long as the two required ones (price and plan_name) are present:
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https://[your-template-link-goes-here]?plan_name=ABC Shop Payment Plan&price=1000&description=This is a payment plan order via ABC Shop&customer_redirect_url=https://abc.com/thanks

And this can be further expanded on with custom fields. Eg:
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https://[your-template-link-goes-here]?plan_name=ABC Shop Payment Plan&price=1000&description=This is a payment plan order via ABC Shop&customer_redirect_url=https://abc.com/thanks&customer_source=influencer-campaign&preferred_color=purple&mobile_phone=(213) 123 4567

You can pass almost any value in the url parameters – including spaces, most punctuation, numbers and most symbols.

You can pre-fill the default fields (name and email) and any custom fields you’ve added in your template. This is useful if your customers have already provided this info in a previous step and you don’t want them to re-enter it, or for tracking your marketing (like utm parameters). This is automatically done in our WooCommerce plugin but you can manually implement it for other workflows.

Use the field IDs shown on your template summary page to do this.

For some workflows, if you've already collected some information in a previous step and don't want the customer to be able to change it, like if they've entered their name and email on a previous step you can pre-fill and freeze those fields so they will be visible, but not editable when the customer's plan payment page is generated:

This ensures customer data remains the same between your various systems. To do this, for any fields you’re pre-filling using the IDs above, add a new value (freeze) at the end of the template url and then pass the field IDs separated by commas – freeze=name,email etc. This only works for fields you are pre-filling.

Most of the above happens automatically behind the scenes when you're using our ecommerce plugins, like WooCommerce. But you can use the template url however you want, with any other system, as long as you pass the two required fields to it. If using templates with Shopify or other eCommerce workflows, you just paste in the template url into our Zapier action step, in addition to any required or optional values by following on-screen instructions.

You can also use the templates functionality above with any other system, form builder tools like Formstack, Tally, JotForm or any other setup where you can pass values to url parameters. We outline an example flow using a third party tool (JotForm) here as a demonstration but this applies to almost any form system or other scenario where you can pass values via url parameters to another url (our template link)

You can set up a payment plan flow on Shopify with these step by step instructions.

We'd love to help! Just reach out via the chat icon or email hello@paythen.co.
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