Back to all FAQs
Splitit is a payment plan tool that allows merchants to offer payment plans to their customers. Unlike other buy-now-pay-later companies, there are no credit checks or approval process for customers.
When your customers make a purchase, Splitit charges the first installment payment and the full amount of the purchase is held on the customer’s credit card too. As a customer pays the installments, the amount that is held is reduced. While this sounds good in theory as a merchant, most customers don’t like it as it reduces their available credit and defeats the point of them choosing a payment plan in the first place.
To use Splitit, customers must have enough available credit on their credit card for the full amount of the purchase. The held amount typically appears as a “pending transaction” on their credit card statement. For this reason, Splitit only works for customers that have a Visa or Mastercard credit card. This does limit the portion of your customers that can use the payment plan option.
Splitit only works on eCommerce sites – whereas Paythen works anywhere, on any site, and even without a site. Each plan in Paythen gets it’s own unique link that can be shared with your customers wherever they are – like Whatsapp, Linktree, Facebook groups and more – leading a to faster, friction-free checkout anywhere.
Paythen is a better payment plan alternative for many businesses because it is faster and easier to set up, works with all major credit and debit cards, and has lower fees than Splitit. Your customers will also prefer Paythen – because we don’t hold the full amount on their cards, and they get a smoother, better designed experience both during and after the initial payment. We have various built-in automations and tools that reduce admin for you and let customers help themselves. You can try Paythen fee-free for 7 days to see if it is suitable for you.
Was this answer helpful ? Yes / No
- See customer progress and speed up your workflow with handy admin controls
- Customers can now make early payments for any amount
- Offer multiple payment plan options on WooCommerce
- Pass any data from your WooCommerce checkout to Paythen payment plans
- Purpose built phone field with international number validation & more
- Date-based payment plans unlock more flexibility
- Support for Custom WooCommerce statuses
- WooCommerce order ID now included in the plan name
- Offer your branded digital gift cards and allow redemptions on Paythen
- Overdue statuses: Understand who’s falling behind
Close
See customer progress and speed up your workflow with handy admin controls
Admin
See customer progress at a glance with the new admin panel visible on the customer detail page. This is visible only to you as a logged in user and allows you to quickly see a customer’s payment plan progress as well as their current status. Previously, you had to switch between the customer list page and the details page to see the status. The progress indicator also ties in to our newly released offers functionality which lets you send customers automated discount offers based on their payment plan progress. Progress percentage is currently only available for payment plan customers (not date-based payment plans). Support for date-based plans is coming soon.
And easy admin controls for common customer actions like pausing, cancelling and more make your admin workflow faster. Over time, additional admin controls will become available here. This admin controls panel is only visible to you and never to customers when they view their page.
Close
Customers can now make early payments for any amount
Payment Pages
Your customers on payment plans now have three flexible options to make early payments – the existing full plan early payment, and two new flexible options to pay the next upcoming payment earlier or enter any amount. This is a highly requested feature since it helps your customers better manage their cashflow by making smaller or earlier payments that better suit them. We automatically adjust all future amounts and dates when a customer makes an early payment. If you offer an early pay discount, this will continue to work like before and will only be available to customers who choose the pay-in-full early payment option.
If a customer makes a partial early payment that fully covers their next scheduled payment, then that is automatically skipped and immediately reflected on their customer page so they know when their next scheduled payment will be charged. Customers can make full or partial early payments any time via their self-serve customer page, so there is no extra admin for you or your team.
All your existing and new customers will see an updated button on their customer page. The button text adjusts dynamically based on whether you offer an early pay discount or not:
They will then be shown a pop-up with three options, pay just the next upcoming amount, pay the full remaining balance (with a discount if you’ve offered one), or pay any amount they want.
Regardless of the option or amount they choose, all adjustments are handled automatically and immediately. Customers will be shown their customers page with the updated amounts and statuses and they can make additional early payments if they’d like.
Any Zapier triggers you have will continue to trigger for full or partial early payments too. This functionality is available to all customers on standard payment plans. For customers on date-based payment plans, they can pay in full or for the next upcoming milestone but cannot enter manual amounts at the moment. Support for manually entered amounts is coming shortly for customers on date-based plans.
Flexible early payment options help reduce failed payments and improve your customers’ experience with their payment plans.
Close
Offer multiple payment plan options on WooCommerce
Woocommerce
You can now choose to offer up to three different payment plan options on your WooCommerce store. At checkout, when customers choose the payment plan option, they’ll be asked to choose from up to three payment plan options. Till now, you could only offer different plans based on different cart amounts. With this update included in v0.7.8 and higher of our WooCommerce plugin, you can now offer all customers multiple payment plan options. To use this option, download and install v0.7.8 or higher via your Paythen settings > integrations page here.
Each payment plan option can have completely different settings including billing intervals, surcharges, upfront fees, and more. This lets your customers choose a payment plan option that best aligns with your cashflow and typically helps increases conversion rates.
See this feature in action on our WooCommerce payment plans demo store. As with all features in our plugin, this feature is fully compatible and tested with most WooCommerce customization plugins and checkout flows including popular ones like CartFlows (CartFlows demo), Funnelkit (Funnelkit demo) and many others. If you run into any issues, just reach out to us via chat.
Close
Pass any data from your WooCommerce checkout to Paythen payment plans
Woocommerce
Need to pass some important fields from your checkout to Paythen payment plans? Whether you need customer order notes, company names, or any other fields important to your workflow, you can now map up to 5 additional fields from your checkout and pre-fill their data in visible or hidden custom fields on your customers’ Paythen payment plans. These are then linked to the customer as custom fields and visible to account admins on the customer page in the Paythen dashboard making it easy to keep all relevant context regarding customer payment plans in one place. You can map any default or custom fields you’re using in your store. This feature is available in version 0.7.7 and higher.
To use this feature, download and install v0.7.7 or higher via your Paythen settings > integrations page here. Then add custom fields into your Paythen template and finally, just map each custom field from Paythen using the field ID we’ll provide, to your WooCommerce checkout fields. You can map up to five fields at the moment.The data in these can be visible to customers on their Paythen payment plan page or if you’ve set these custom fields to be hidden in Paythen, the data will get added but won’t show to customers on their payment plan page.
See this feature in action on our WooCommerce payment plans demo store. As with all features in our plugin, this feature is fully compatible and tested with most WooCommerce customization plugins and checkout flows including popular ones like CartFlows (CartFlows demo), Funnelkit (Funnelkit demo) and many others. If you run into any issues, just reach out to us via chat.
Close
Purpose built phone field with international number validation & more
Payment Pages
Improve the quality of data with our new purpose-built phone field. It automatically validates the format of entered numbers based on the user’s selected country and always saves phone numbers in your Paythen customer data as well as Stripe metadata in a consistent international number format with the country code.
Before this, you had to use a standard text field with no consistent formatting, validation, country codes. The new phone field has all this built in and saves all entered numbers in a standard format with the country code. This is also passed to Stripe and Zapier in this consistent format.
This makes it easier to set up advanced workflows involving text messages and more using Zapier.
To get started, just create a new plan and choose the phone field type under custom fields. If you’re an existing user and want to add this phone field to plans with existing customers, just reach out to us and we can help.
Close
Date-based payment plans unlock more flexibility
Admin
Existing payment plans work relative to when a customer signs up. This suits many use cases but if you’re selling something aligned around a date – events, travel, courses, workshops, retreats, etc, you need more control. Our new date-based payment plans give you this flexibility. They work like you’d expect – instead of setting a billing interval, you’ll choose dates in the future and the amount to be charged on each date. Everyone on the plan is charged on those same dates.
Any customers that sign up after one or more payment milestone has passed are also automatically handled and are charged for any milestones in the past automatically when they sign up.
You can also create templates for use in eCommerce and with third-party forms. You just need to set pre-assigned dates and percentages next to each date, and customers are automatically charged what they owe on each date based on their cart total. This lets you sell different tiers/options to each customer while still collecting all payments on the same dates, making management a lot easier.
Date-based plans also work with all our Zapier triggers and actions. To get started, create your first date-based plan or template from your Paythen dashboard, check out this demo plan or read this getting started guide.
Close
Support for Custom WooCommerce statuses
Woocommerce
Before now, you could only set default WooCommerce statuses as the ones to automatically move a new payment plan order to in WooCommerce once a customer completes their payment plan sign up. With v0.7.4 and above, you can now set custom statuses (using any third party status management plugin) and they will all now be selectable within your Paythen plugin settings.
This now lets you set up more granular and custom order management workflows internally and better identify orders on a payment plan vs. other payment methods. Once you have created any new order statuses in your WooCommerce store, just go to your Paythen plugin settings and select that status from the Paythen order status dropdown.
Now, once customers have selected the payment plan option at checkoutandcompleted the Paythen payment plan sign up, they will be moved to this new order status. Customers that select the payment plan option and checkout but don’t complete the payment plan sign up will continue to be assigned the “Payment pending” status.
Close
WooCommerce order ID now included in the plan name
Woocommerce
With our WooCommerce plugin v0.7.3 and above, we now pass the WooCommerce order ID in the generated plan name for each customer. This lets you easily identify and match the relevant order in your WooCommerce dashboard to the plan generated in Paythen.
We also pass the same order ID as a url parameter when the plan is generated. This means if you add a new custom field in your Paythen template called wc order number or wc_order_number it will now automatically save this order ID value into the customer’s record as a hidden custom field, and this value is then automatically passed to our Zapier app triggers as well as into your Stripe account as metadata.
Close
Offer your branded digital gift cards and allow redemptions on Paythen
Woocommerce
Paythen now lets your customers redeem your company’s digital gift cards on your payment plans. To enable this, you just need to sign up and set up your gift card sales page over at cardivo.com (it’s free to sign up). Then enable the Paythen integration with a few clicks.
Offering branded digital gift cards will help you increase your revenue from existing customers that know and like your business, and will drive new customers (their friends and family) to buy from you since Cardivo gift cards can only be redeemed at your business, unlike traditional visa debit cards that add no value to your business and cost you a lot of money.
Cardivo is developed by us and is independent of, but seamlessly works with, Paythen. It is easy to set up and use, just like Paythen, and requires no credit card. Find out more and sign up here to get started. Then follow these steps to enable it in Paythen.
If you have a WooCommerce store, you can also use Cardivo directly on your store’s checkout. Cardivo works with Paythen but is also a fully featured digital gift card platform on its own.
Close
Overdue statuses: Understand who’s falling behind
Admin
Easily keep track of customers with failed payments, with three new Overdue statuses in Paythen. Till now, customers with one or more failed payment attempts showed as In Progress just like customers with no failed payments.
We’re introducing three new Overdue statuses – to let you easily see any customers falling behind on their plan. Overdue – Retrying, Overdue – At risk and Overdue – Manual action required. For the first two statuses, there is no manual action needed. Re-attempts will continue automatically as per your Stripe settings. Customers whose payments go through will change back to the InProgress status.
For customers showing the third (manual action required) status, they have exhausted all automated payment attempts and a new payment method must be entered. Once it is, the plan may need to be manually resumed from within Stripe. There’s more detail about this and all other statuses in this help article.
