Using Stripe as Your Payment Gateway

Note: This guide is for the Zippy Courses WordPress plugin. If you are using the Zippy Courses All-In-One Platform, check out this guide instead.

Stripe is a third party service that allows you to simply and quickly process credit cards without storing any sensitive user data. If you use Stripe, people will be entering credit card details on your site. 

For security reasons, Zippy Courses requires that you have an SSL certificate installed on your site if you will be using Stripe. Your purchases will not appear on your site until you set up an SSL certificate. Additionally, Stripe requires that all purchases be at least $0.50 - making a purchase for less than $0.50 will be rejected by Stripe. Depending on your currency, these minimums may be slightly higher, so we recommend making purchases no smaller than $1 through Stripe.

For more help on how to set up an SSL certificate to work with your domain, we recommend reading this article by Yoast, and contacting your host for further support.

Integrating with Stripe

To start, you'll need to locate your Stripe keys in your Stripe account. To do so, log in to your Stripe account on https://stripe.com/, then click on API in the navigation menu on the left.

On the API Keys page, you will find your Publishable and Secret keys. Click the Reveal live key token button covering your Secret key to reveal it. You will be prompted to authenticate by entering your login credentials before you may do so. After that, copy both keys.

If you wish to make test payments without processing real credit cards, you will need to switch to test mode by clicking the View test data switch.

Once in test mode, you'll find your test Publishable and Secret keys. Reveal your test Secret key the same way you would your live Secret key (above), and copy both keys.

Note: When copying these API keys, also make sure the API Version in Stripe is on the latest version. Older versions of the Stripe API may be incompatible with Zippy Courses.

Now that you have those, log in to your WordPress site, hover your mouse over the Zippy Courses tab, and click Settings. Click the Payment tab, then Stripe.

Enter the Publishable and Secret keys you copied from your Stripe account into the appropriate fields.

Note: If you wish to test your integration, enter your test keys, and make sure to switch Test Mode? to Yes. You'll find this directly below the Publishable Key field. Remember that real credit cards won't work when running a test purchase in Test Mode. Click here for a list of fake test credit cards for you to use instead. If you're entering your live keys, make sure that Test Mode? is set to No.

Once you're done, click Save Changes.

Congratulations, you've successfully integrated with Stripe! There's one last step that's particularly important if you plan to offer installment payment or subscription payment options for your courses, and that's setting your your webhooks. For more information on that process and what webhooks are exactly, check out our Creating your Stripe Webhooks support guide.