Searchie: How to Create a Stripe Customer Portal
Searchie is an amazing platform for delivering your online course, membership, or coaching program. But exactly how do you do the money side—so you can sell one-off offerings, recurring payments, and bundled offerings? The answer is creating your Stripe customer portal in Searchie.
The customer portal can be accessed by your Searchie Hub’s users by clicking on their profile icon in the top-right corner of the Hub. At the portal, they can do things like change their method of payment and change their payment plan (for example, they can go from paying monthly to paying yearly, taking advantage of discounted pricing).
Set Up Your Stripe Payments
You’ve created a Searchie Hub and, through Searchie Payments, established a Stripe account. In your Stripe account, set up your offerings and their prices. This can be prices for payment plans (one price for paying upfront, another monthly price for a recurring payment over a set number of months). It can be for recurring payments for a membership (automatically charging the member monthly, for 6 months, or yearly—all at different prices). You can include add-on sale pricing as well as prices for bundles. Whatever you offer in any possible combination needs to be represented in your Stripe accounts.
Give Your Clients Access to Their Portal
Next, you want to give your Searchie clients access to their payment portal. In your Stripe customer portal, go to the Settings/Billing/Customer Portal section and toggle on the various sections inside. For example, in the Payment Methods section, make sure that “Allow customer to update their payment methods” is toggled on. Then go to Subscriptions and toggle on “Cancel Subscriptions”—this is a must if you don’t want to have to manually remove people from Searchie when they cancel. You can also toggle on “Allow customers to switch to a different pricing plan.”
Stripe gives you the ability to design your customer portal to show exactly what you want to present there. For example, you have the option of showing the payment/invoice history.
The Customer Portal Saves Everyone Time
The Stripe customer portal puts your members into the driver's seat. It eliminates back-and-forth communication between you and the client when it comes to the nitty-gritty details of payment. When there’s a new expiration date on a client’s credit card, they don’t need to contact you, saving time for you both.
As far as making it easy for the client to cancel their Searchie membership without having to tell you personally, my stance is that your membership should provide so much value and attract the right people so that they want to stay and play. And if they’re ready to move on, they should be able to do that without awkwardness or hassles that leave a sour taste in their mouth. And,using the automation means you don’t have to do any manual removal of your people in Searchie…again, saving you time!
Setting Up the Stripe Customer Portal with Searchie is a Snap
It couldn’t be easier to set up your Stripe customer portal! Once it’s there, you and your clients will enjoy a seamless experience. But if you break out in a cold sweat when you consider setting up Stripe payments and creating your customer portal, I’m here to help. I help my clients set this up as part of my Build My Hub VIP Experience. I’ve helped scores of clients create the Searchie Hub of their dreams faster and easier than they could ever imagine. I’d be happy to do the same for you!
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