New integrated payment features set to launch on Wednesday!
The temperature keeps rising and the new features keep rolling out. This week, we've got a huge one for you. It's one of the most requested pieces of functionality ever. That's right, folks, we're talking about online payments. Now you can easily collect money for registrations, products, or anything else you desire using your choice of merchant account — Authorize.net, Google Checkout, or PayPal.
Since our mission is to provide the easiest-to-use software available, we've kept things simple here. Online payments are integrated with our form builder through Icebrrg and through forms integrated into any one of our web content management systems. You simply create a form, set pricing, set up your payment details, and you're set.
Create a form and enable payments
Want to sell something, charge for a registration, or set up any other type of payment? First, set up a form to collect the info you need. You're already familiar with our form builder tool so this should be no problem. To enable payments on the form, just visit the Form Settings tab and look for "Payment Settings."
Use the drop down, multiple choice, or checkbox fields to let the user choose what they want to buy. For example, use checkboxes to create a list of products the user can select to purchase. Or, use dropdowns to let the user choose quantities. The form builder gives you ultimate flexibility for configuring your forms and payments to meet your needs.
Set pricing for each item
Once you've set up your form, set the pricing for each item by configuring the payment information for the drop down, multiple choice and checkbox fields you added. You can also add a "price" field which lets the user enter their own amount to pay if you wish (this is good for donations).
Set up your payment details
Next, configure the payment details for the form. All you have to do
is enter the account information for the merchant account you want to
use for the transactions. You can also enter a "base price" for the
form as a whole if you want.
Take it live
Once everything is set up, take the form live. When your users fill out your form, they will checkout securely through your merchant account provider. You will see form entries for all form submissions with real-time payment status updates to let you know when the user has been charged successfully.
Simple yet powerful
That's how we like to build things — simple, yet powerful. By leveraging the form-building functionality already in our system, the new integrated payments are a snap to start using and they don't require any additional styling or templates. You're ready to go as soon as they go live.
Speaking of going live, the payments will launch on Wednesday morning, July 9th at 8am CDT (GMT -5). There will be an estimated five minutes of system-wide downtime while the upgrades are loaded. Since this is a 100% opt-in feature, your existing websites and forms should not be affected.
Paid accounts only
Integrated payments is the second feature to be added to our suite of content management systems as a "paid account only" feature (the other feature is stats). This means that free websites on the WaterCMS, SkyCMS and LightCMS systems will not have access to integrated payments, but ALL paid websites, no matter their package level, will have unlimited access to the functionality.
On forms running through Icebrrg directly, our two lowest package levels (Cruiser and Frigate) will receive the payment functionality but at a limit of five transactions per form. The two higher-end packages (Yacht and Titanic) will receive unlimited transactions on all forms.
Posted on
Monday, July 7, 2008
by Tim Wall