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Teachery Help Documentation
Setting Up Your Course
Creating Payment Plans, Recurring Payments, or Membership Sites
Creating Payment Plans, Recurring Payments, or Membership Sites

And how we help you handle failed payments, course access, and updating customer credit card billing information.

Jason Zook avatar
Written by Jason Zook
Updated over a week ago

If you're looking to offer payment plans for your courses, monthly subscriptions, or yearly memberships, our Recurring Payment Page feature should do just the trick!

πŸ“Œ IMPORTANT FIRST STEP: In your Stripe account, please ensure you have these settings in place:

  • Login to your Stripe account

  • Go to Settings >> Subscriptions and emails

  • Find the "Manage failed payments" section

  • For "Retry schedule" click the radio button to "Use Smart Retries"

  • For "Customer emails" toggle ON the "Send emails when card payments fail"

  • For "Subscription status" set the dropdown to "mark the subscription as unpaid"

These settings will help ensure that we can recover failed payments during a recurring payment subscription for you. πŸ˜ƒΒ 

πŸ’Έ Great job! Now, let's create a Recurring Payment Page (Monthly or Annual Payments):

  • Login to Teachery >>

  • Select a course you want to edit and click on it >>

  • From the sidebar, click Payment Pages and then + Add Payment Page >>

  • In the Payment Type dropdown menu, Select Recurring Monthly* or Recurring Yearly >>

  • Set your monthly/yearly price and select the number of months/years** >>

  • Create and customize! πŸŽ‰

*Whether you choose Monthly or Yearly for your recurring payments, your customer's credit card will be charged on the same day of the month as their first purchase (Ex: They bought a monthly plan on April 12, their next charge will be May 12. If a customer buys a yearly plan on April 12, their next charge will be April 12 of the following year.
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​**By default, we'll set any recurring payment (monthly or yearly) to infinite payments going forward. Changing the number of months/years when creating your recurring payment will set a specific timeframe.

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πŸ€” Want to give your customers the option to pay via a 1-time payment OR payment plan on the SAME payment page?

Let's say you have a course with two payment options:

  1. $200 1-time ("Fixed") payment

  2. $20 monthly for 12 months ("Monthly Recurring") payment

The first thing you'll want to do is create EACH payment page separately. Name the pages, set the price, and customize the pages to your liking.

Whichever payment page you want to be the default option, while editing that page you'll want to toggle ON the Add Payment Options + orange button. This option will only appear when you have multiple payment pages created.

Toggle ON the option, then check the boxes β˜‘οΈ for the payment options you want to be displayed on the payment page. That's it! Now, you can share your payment page and your customer will see multiple options they can choose between πŸ’Έ πŸ‘ .

πŸ‘₯ Looking to have a "Membership Site" where you get paid on a recurring basis and deliver more content to your customers?

We put "membership site" in quotes because Teachery is still a course platform at its core. That said, our recurring payment pages are perfectly suited to build a course that is essentially a membership site.

😘 There are ZERO additional steps needed to create a "membership site!"

Just think of your course as a membership portal. The recurring payment page you create (as outlined above) will charge your customer on the schedule you decide. Then, you can add additional lessons and content to your course as time goes on.

Want to automatically email your customers when new content has been added? We integrate with MailChimp and ConvertKit or you can export your customer data and import it into your email provider of choice.
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πŸ†˜ How we help you handle failed recurring payments...

We have good news and bad news.

Bad news: You will almost always encounter failed payments when selling anything with recurring payments. It's just the nature of the beast. We're sorry to break this to you.

Good news! The good news is, we have you covered!Β 

When you create your first recurring payment page, you will find a new email you can customize within your course editor:

  • Click on the course to edit it >>

  • Look in the left sidebar for "Course Emails" section >>

  • Click the Recurring Payment Failed email

You can customize that email, including the subject line, from name, from email, logo, email colors, and content.Β 

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Please do NOT remove the "UPDATE YOUR BILLING" link. If you want to change the text, you may do that, but ensure that the link stays in the email otherwise, your student won't be able to fix the failed payment issue.

Our recurring payment failed emails work like this:

  1. When the first recurring payment fails, your recurring payment failed email will be sent to your customer.
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  2. If they do not take action, another TWO emails (same exact emails) will be sent on a varying schedule (this schedule is determined by Stripe).
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  3. πŸ‘ If your customer updates their billing information at any time, no more failed payment emails will be sent and they will be good to go!
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  4. πŸ‘Ž Should your customer NOT update their billing information after the 3rd email, we will roadblock course access from the student on your behalf. This means if they try to log in to the course, they will only see the billing update page (no matter what page of your course they try to view).

If your customer never updates their billing information, they will continue to be locked out of your course forever (until they add billing info again).Β 

Pro-tip: If you're using a recurring payment option, we recommend creating a spreadsheet of your own that you update on the schedule in which your payments get requested (monthly, annually, etc). This is a tedious task, but it's also the best way to ensure you're keeping an eye on your customer's payment activity.Β 

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Here's an abridged version of our other help doc on Revoking Access, etc. These are actions you can take in a Customer's Profile (found by clicking a customer record on the Customers page).

Revoke Access: By clicking this link you will be removing a customer's access to your course. This will NOT refund any existing payments and will NOT cancel any recurring payment subscriptions your customer might have. This CAN be undone by clicking Grant Access (which appears only after you Revoke Access).

Refund: You can refund a single payment OR you'll see individual payments for recurring payment purchases. You can refund any payments and refunding will NOT result in revoking access to your course. We recommend refunding payments via your Customer Profiles in Teachery instead of within your Stripe account because it keeps the records up to date in Teachery.Β 

Pause Subscription: If a customer needs to have their subscription payment extended out into the future, you can do that using our Pause Subscription action. You can read more on pausing subscriptions here.

Cancel Subscription: If a customer has purchased your course via a recurring payment page and you want to stop any future payments, use the Cancel Subscription link. This will NOT refund your customer and will NOT revoke access: Their payments will simply come to an end.

Updating Customer Billing Info: If a customer purchases a recurring payment plan, but needs to update their credit card information, we make it really easy. You can find this URL in the "Course Links" section of a course editor (top left of the sidebar). Or, you can simply give your customer the URL of your course with "/billing" added to the end. For example, if your course URL is yourcourse.teachery.co, you would give them yourcourse.teachery.co/billing - that's it! (If you use a custom domain or custom subdomain, you can give them that URL with /billing on the end.)

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πŸŽ₯ Watch the walk-through video below for more information and seeing our recurring payments feature in action!

Use the chapter marker dots in the video timeline to jump to different sections.

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