Accepting Online Payments Without an Online Store

Ever found yourself with a customer who would like to pay your invoice online but you don’t have an online store setup? Wouldn’t it be great if you could send your customer a link directly from your FileMaker invoice screen that takes them to a secure, online payment page where they can quickly and easily pay for invoice by credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay etc.

Research has shown that small businesses get paid up to twice as fast with online invoice payments. With online payments you can get paid up to 15 days faster and, in some cases, you get paid instantly.

Customers love online payment too, because it’s quick and easy. Plus they have the option to pay by credit card, which gives them extra financial flexibility.

There are a number of options for accepting online credit card payments without requiring you to setup your own online eCommerce store. To start accepting online payments you will need an account with a payment service like Stripe or PayPal.

Here are some examples of ways that you can accept online payments for your FileMaker generated invoices. I’m using our fmAccounting Link (Xero Edition) solution to demonstrate these.

Xero Pay Now

If you’re using Xero for your accounting software you can setup an online payment service like Stripe and connect this to your Xero account in just a few clicks. Once setup a ‘Pay now’ button displays on your online invoices, allowing customers to pay with credit card, debit card, or Apple Pay on their mobile device.

Here’s a screenshot of a typical invoice generated in our fmEcommerce Link solution:

Once the Invoice has been uploaded to Xero we can retrieve the Online Invoice URL and send this to the customer with our FileMaker generated invoice, or email the customer via Xero using the Email Invoice button. The online invoice looks like this with the Pay now button in the top left corner:

Customers click the Pay now button and enter their preferred payment details. Another advantage of accepting online payments is that invoices that are paid using a payment service are automatically marked as paid in Xero and ready to be matched with a transaction on your bank statement.

Stripe Integration

We’ve worked on many projects over the years helping customers connect their FileMaker business apps to Stripe for credit card processing integration. We’ve also setup Stripe webhooks so we can receive automatic notifications in FileMaker when a payment has been processed by Stripe.

You can also use Stripe to create an invoice with an online URL and send that to customers.

Here’s a screenshot of the same invoice ready to be uploaded to Stripe:

We can then upload the invoice to Stripe and have Stipe email the customer with the online payment link. We can also store the online invoice URL in FileMaker which we can send to the customer directly.

Here’s how the online invoice looks in Stripe:

Customers click the Pay button and enter their preferred payment details.

Another advantage accepting credit card payments online is that you are not physically handling any credit card numbers and don’t have to worry about PCI DSS compliance.

Here’s a short video demonstrating creating online payments from FileMaker via Xero and Stripe (you can also watch this on YouTube here):