New Feature

Payment Plans in OptimizeCheckouts

You can now offer greater flexibility with your pricing for products sold with OptimizeCheckouts.  Payment plans allow your buyers to spread their payments over the course of a number of payments at intervals that you schedule.

By David Frosdick

May 11, 2021

A fundamental part of an online business is making sales and taking payments. Converting website visitors into paying customers is more than just the technical set up of adding a checkout form to your sales pages. 

To ensure you convert the most customers, you need to remove any obstacles that might make people question a purchase before completing the transaction.

Offering a range of payment options to customers means they can choose a schedule that fits their circumstances and gives them choices that might have alternatively meant they would have abandoned the checkout without completing their purchase.  

At OptimizePress, we focus on adding more and more payment options into our Checkouts plugin so that you can maximise the most business revenue. 

After releasing OptimizeCheckouts in May 2020, we continued to evolve the plugin. 

Shortly after that, we launched upsells and downsells to checkouts.

We then integrated all this into OptimizeFunnels.

And in March 2021, we rolled out subscription payments.

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, when the ability for you to sell subscription plans was added to OptimizeCheckouts we said "Payment Plans are coming very soon".

Pause.... Deep breath...

Well, that "coming soon" time is right now!

Payments Plans have now been added to OptimizeCheckouts 👊 This means you can set up Payment Plans for selling your digital products.

Go stand up, have a dance, jump around for a bit then come back here!

As our Aussie friends down under say, we are stoked about this and excited to share it with you today!

This feature really opens up the doors for you to access the widest range of potential customers possible. 

If you are using OptimizeCheckouts to sell, you now have the options to take one time payments, sell subscription plans, offer order bumps, upsell and downsell additional products and as of now you can also offer payment plans as a payment option for customers.

So what is a Payment Plan?

A Payment Plan is where you take the value of the product you’re selling and split the cost into a set number of payments - making it more affordable to people.

Payments Plans can sometimes be referred to as:

Instalment Payments
Instalment Plans
Split Payments
Payment Plans
Limited Subscriptions

These all mean the same thing.

One key factor of checkout conversions is offering different pricing options for your products.

A great way to increase conversions is by turning a single payment product into a payment plan.

By splitting up payments for higher-priced items, you immediately make an attractive offer for customers who want to purchase but can't afford the larger up front one-time fee.

Payment plans are an easy way for customers to calculate and budget for their purchases quickly.

Large one-time payments can sometimes be too expensive for consumers to outlay in one go which creates a barrier for them to buy.

Purchase barriers in the sales process can harm sales, especially if the customer doesn't know your business.

Now, with this new update for OptimizeCheckouts, you can introduce a payment plan and bingo! 🙌

You can create payment plans that spread payments for a purchase over a set period, let's say 3/4/5 months, for example. Payment plans can be the perfect solution for customers budgeting and can positively sway their decision to purchase. A simple payment structure can increase your conversions instantly.

You can also offer daily/weekly/monthly/yearly payment plans depending on your product and however long you want the payment term to run.

The most common payment periods are 3-6 months. As a product creator, this means you can secure a sale and then recoup the remainder of the outstanding balance over a short time period.

Payment plans are worth testing

There's no right or wrong way of doing payment plans; it's purely your choice.

And if you’re unsure what payment period to offer, just run a split test on your OptimizeCheckout pages. It only takes a few clicks to set up inside the OptimizeFunnels Visualiser.

The Buy Now Pay Later market has boomed recently with Klana offering this service to customers. 

Their model is that the customer pays something at the point of purchase and then the remaining amount over three monthly instalments. While this is slightly different to our payment plans feature, the business model is still the same where they spread out the cost.

Klarna payment plan options.

Another company providing this payment plans service is LayBuy. Customers can make a purchase and spread the cost over 6 weekly payments.

For merchants wanting to increase conversions these payment services help bring in extra revenue. And for the customers who budget and don’t want to pay for something in full, it give a little extra pushes for them to purchase.

LayBuy Payment Plans

As more and more companies start offering payment plans for products, we as marketers can use these strategies to increase conversions on our own websites.

If you sell a product that costs $500+, start offering a payment plan today.

Offering these types of instalment payments works great for:

Increasing conversions on high ticket products, course, coaching, masterminds
Reducing monthly expenditure for a customer
Breaking down large yearly payments

Examples Of Payment Plans

Here are some examples of payment plan offers.

The first example shows two pricing options. The single payment option which stands out more and is cheaper, then we have the 12 month payment plan option.

12 month payment plan on $197 product

Here’s another offer, a payment plan for six months, and you’ll pay an extra $300 for the luxury of spreading your payments. 

Increasing the total price a customer will pay if they purchase a payment plan is a common strategy. 

Increasing the payment plan total purchase price is something you will want to consider. It will generate extra revenue for your business, and customers are often happy to pay a slight uplift in the cost to split the payments.

6 month payment plan with one-time payment.

In this next example, you can see another payment plan offering six months of instalments. Customers will pay more for spreading out the payments over the one-time payment option. 

Also, notice the pay-in-full option has additional bonuses that payment plan doesn’t have. Again pushing people towards paying in full.

6 month payment plan with less features.

This final example is from WriteABestSeller.org. They offer a payment plan on a six-month term where customers pay $100 more than if they were paying for the one-time Pro package.

Again these payment plans work for many customers who don’t want to pay in full or simple can’t afford it.

Payment plans are convenient to some customers, so don’t be afraid to price your products higher for a payment plan compared to the one-time payment option.

You could also show how much the customer saves when paying in full; this encourages uptake on the higher priced offers.

6 month payment plan more expensive than 1 payment.

Subscriptions vs Payment Plans

One thing to note is Payment Plans are different to Subscription Plans. Payment plans usually run for a fixed period, like six payments and then they end on the final payment date. Subscription Plans are ongoing payments with no end date until the user cancels.

What next?

Firstly you need to update to the latest version of OptimizePress & optimizeCheckouts. 

This update is part of OptimizeCheckouts, so you’ll need to be on our Suite plan to use Payment Plans.

Once updated, you can go in to OptimizeCeckouts and begin using Payment Plans.

To do this go to OptimizeCheckouts > Products > Create A New Product or edit an existing product.

If a new product give it name and description.

On the next page go to Pricing Information > Add New Plan > Enter your pricing structure (Billing Period & Number of Payments) > click Save.

Notice the blue box explains how the payment plan transaction will work for the customer.

You can create new products that have Payment Plans only or simply add Payment Plans to your existing products.

That's all you have to do start using Payment Plans with your OptimizeCheckout products.

    13 replies to "Payment Plans in OptimizeCheckouts"

    • Nohemi

      Additional to plan Suite payment, do I pay anything else for each transaction in Stripe?

      • James Dyson

        Hi Nohemi. Thank you for your question.

        If you’re using OptimizeCheckouts (part of our Suite plan) your main costs for selling through Stripe would be your transaction fees from Stripe – these are usually around 3% of the transaction amount but depends on your individual country and where the buyer is from. We do not charge any fees on top of the product cost for using OptimizeCheckouts.

    • maribel cifuentes

      Hello! In my country, Colombia, we need a payment update with Epayco and Payu, since our clients are local and gateways such as Stripe and PayPal are not available. We need to make recurring payments, installment payments … etc but with the integration of Epayco and Payu.

    • Roger

      James, I thought about a situation when a subscription is high-priced. So, similarly like for a high price product, a payment plan will convert more people to pay. But a year later, when the subscription needs to renew, it’s again the same high price, thus the renewal should also occur according to a payment plan.

    • Roger

      Hi James,

      I also haven’t seen such subscription – I thought it out when reading the product update. I thought that if one sells a high price product (e.g. a membership program) in instalments, then it’d be even better to have such a product as a recurring one 🙂

      • James Dyson

        Roger – If you can sell a recurring subscription that’s ongoing- this is always going to be better for future business revenue. You just need to ensure that you can provide continual value and keep buyers engaged to stop them churning out of your subscription

    • Stefan

      Can the customer cancel scheduled payments with your system? So the business ships the product or provides the service in full but doesn’t receive full payment. What’s the risk? Thanks

      • James Dyson

        Stefan

        At the moment we do not provide a front end option for the customers to update their subscription. We do plan on building some user admin features in the future for customer facing side. For now, we’d advise adding support links on your site and a clear FAQ for customers to know how they can manage their subscriptions.

        In terms of risk from the business side – the only risk is whether the charge rebills successfully. We’d always advise that for physical products you perhaps wait until full payment is received. Most of our users will use this for digital products, memberships etc – where you can switch off access if a customers subscription or payment plan does not complete successfully.

    • Nel

      Is it now possible to create subscription?

      • James Dyson

        Nel

        We already have subscriptions support when connected with Stripe. You can now do daily, weekly, monthly, yearly subscriptions (and other payment interval combinations) as well as Payment plans.

    • Marisa Santoro

      thank you, I have been waiting for this feature.

    • Roger

      This is an awesome update! Two questions:
      1. Does it work with Stripe?
      2. Can I combine a payment plan with a subscription? For example, a yearly subscription with 3 months payment plan would mean that a customer is billed in January, February and March and then again on those three months in the next year, and so on until he cancels.

      • James Dyson

        Roger – so great to hear your feedback.

        1. Yes – OptimizeCheckouts currently works exclusively with Stripe, so this will work directly with your Stripe account when connected

        2. There isn’t a way to format a subscription/payment plan like this at the moment. We’ve tried to cater for the most common subscription and payment plan scenarios we’ve encountered. I haven’t ever seen a subscription that works like that.

        What’s the reason for billing a customer in that format? If possible, I would try and consider the more widely recognised payment plan formats that customers are familiar with first before testing more innovative pricing arrangements.

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