What is a Stripe Payment Link?
Payment Links are a relatively new product from Stripe, and it could be argued that they are underutilized. Part of the reason might be that it can initially sound too good to be true. A small business with a WordPress site can set up a static catalog page for either products, subscription services, or direct tips/donations, and using Payment Links that they set up in the Stripe dashboard, they can begin accepting online payments with no further development effort.
With Payment Links, your business can take payments and/or sell subscriptions without additional standalone websites or applications. You can share these Payment Links an unlimited number of times in a variety of places – like your website, in emails, and on social media.
Payment Links support over 20 payment methods, including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The Payment Link automatically matches your customer’s preferred browser language for over 30 languages.
It’s so simple it can be hard to visualize.
Stripe Payment Links Demo
Sometimes, it can be easier to show than to tell, so here is a demonstration. The Stripe dashboard experience of creating a Payment Link includes an interactive preview of the end user experience as you define your Payment Link.
Although most business owners are not technologists, they are savvy about the advantages of having a flexible, powerful, and secure customer payment process. Many are likely to have had prior experience setting up some kind of payment system, and this may be where the confusion about Payment Links creeps in. Until you wrap your head around it, it’s reasonable to assume there is going to be significant effort involved or that there must be some significant catch.
For example, there may be a concern that a no-code option will mean complicated integration with the accounting software, fulfillment systems, etc. The good news is that there are also powerful tools to handle fulfillment and customize what happens after a Payment Links payment.
Customizing Payment Link Payments
Track Payments
Your Dashboard includes a payment overview, where you can see which customers have made a payment using a Payment Link and when they did so.
You control if you want to receive emails for all successful payments in your profile settings.
For one-time payments, Stripe creates a new guest customer. For customers purchasing a subscription or saving a payment method for future use, Stripe creates a new Customer.
Automatically Handle Post-Purchase Activities
You can automate post-purchase activities like order fulfillment, order-related emails, customer database updates, and accounting system updates. We recommend taking this one step further and connecting Stripe data to your other business applications using event flow-based tools like Soliant.cloud, Claris Connect, Zapier, etc.
Payment Links can also handle sophisticated fulfillment use cases programmatically with the Stripe API and webhooks after a customer pays via a Payment Link. These options require custom code but are fully compatible with no-code Payment Links.
Change Confirmation Behavior
After a successful payment, your customer sees a localized confirmation message thanking them for their purchase. You can then increase engagement with your new customer by customizing the confirmation message or redirect to a URL of your choice. To change the confirmation behavior on a Payment Link, click the Confirmation page tab when creating or updating a Payment Link.
Per the excellent online Stripe documentation, “if you redirect your customers to your own confirmation page, you can include {CHECKOUT_SESSION_ID} in the redirect URL to dynamically pass the customer’s current Checkout Session ID. This is helpful if you want to tailor the success message on your website based on the information in the Checkout Session. You can also add UTM codes as parameters in the query string of the Payment Link URL. The UTM codes are automatically added to your redirect URL when your customer completes a payment.” 
Encourage Customers to Manage Their Subscriptions
Create a link that you can send to customers, letting them log in and manage their subscriptions using the customer portal. A detailed discussion of Stripe Customer Portals is beyond the scope of this post and is a topic we may dive into in a future post. In the meantime, Stripe hosts a live demo you can explore.
