From the course: WordPress Ecommerce: WooCommerce
Setting up Stripe
- [Narrator] It's pretty rare for an E-commerce store to just accept PayPal. They almost always let someone pay with a credit card. Credit cards are good because they let anyone pay without having to create some sort of account. While PayPal accounts might be popular here in the US, they're not universal, so it's important to let people checkout with credit cards. If you went through the Welcome Wizard and selected Stripe, WooCommerce automatically installed the Stripe plugin for you. If you don't have this plugin installed, you can install it like any other WordPress plugin. I turned off Stripe earlier in this course because I didn't need it right away. So let's start by turning it back on. I'll go to Plugins, and here is the WooCommerce Stripe Gateway. Let's turn that on. We can dismiss these, and let's go to WooCommerce, Settings, Payments, and then Stripe. You may notice there's a bunch of different Stripes. Some of these work in specific countries. But for right now we're just going to set up this main Stripe. We can configure all sorts of settings on this page, but before we do, let's get the most important settings out of the way, and those are the four keys. Two keys for Live Mode, and two keys for Test Mode, and Stripe makes it easy to do this. You can sign up for an account and get test keys without having to fill out any business information like a bank account, employer identification number, et cetera. That's a huge pain to get, and many old school payment gateways force you to have that. So if you haven't already, head over to stripe.com and create a free test account. I've already created one. I've gone ahead and viewed test data, and then gone to API keys. On this page, you can see your publishable key and your secret key, and I've already copied my secret key to my clipboard. I'll go back to my site, I'll paste in my secret key, go back to Stripe, copy my public key, and paste those both in there. If you have Live Mode enabled already, you can turn off Test Mode and now you see this as Live Publishable Key and Live Secret Key. Let's go ahead and save every setting as is, just to show you what the default checkout looks like. I'll take a look at the store. Let's add something to our cart. We'll view the cart. We'll checkout. And now instead of cash on delivery, we see PayPal and Credit Card Stripe. Let's click Stripe. Because we're in Test Mode, Stripe adds this message right here. So we'll just copy in this test credit card, you can enter any valid date in the future, and any valid three letter code. And let's go ahead and save payment information to this account for future purchases. We'll talk about this a little bit later. Let's click place order, and the order is received. Payment was successful, and the order is marked as processing in the back end. It only took us a few minutes to process a test credit card transaction. Let's go back to the Stripe Settings and configure these a little bit more. Users just need to see Credit Card. They probably don't need to see Stripe, We can even get rid of pay with your credit card via Stripe. We'll just say, pay with your credit card. We'll leave these as is. This is useful for customers to know who charged them for what. So go ahead and put your store name here. We also want to capture the charge immediately. If it does take you some time to create or ship the products, let's say, a couple days, then you want to capture the charge once you've shipped the product. But for most orders, if you're shipping it in less than 24 hours, it's just easier to capture the charge immediately. We definitely want to turn on Apple Pay, as well as Chrome Pay. And there are a couple theme options here. And lastly there is saved cards. Saving credit card information is a huge time saver for the user, and it prevents all sorts of silly mistakes, like typing in the credit card number incorrectly. But the one important thing to note is that your site isn't storing the credit card number, it's storing something called a token. A token is a representation of a credit card number. Think of it as a special password just for your site. So if your site tells Stripe the password for a particular customer, Stripe will use the credit card number. Stripe is the one that's actually saving the information here. If someone ever happened to steal that special password and they gave it to Stripe, Stripe wouldn't process the card because it's specific to your account. In that way, tokens are much safer. If someone hacked your site, it's very unlikely that they'd be able to do anything with those tokens, so they're very safe. That's why I recommend enabling payment via saved cards. And the last setting here is logging. You can turn this on if you're having problems with Stripe. Make a couple test transactions and go onto the log and see exactly what's happening. I added this functionality to Stripe myself just to make sure that I can track down any weird bugs. There are almost never any bugs, but it's nice to have a log, just in case. When you launch, make sure to turn off Test Mode and make sure you have a live Stripe account ready to go with live keys. Save your settings and you're ready to accept credit card payments. to accept credit card payments.
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