Hello fellow form builders,

Successfully processing payments without you even having to enter a line of code, we are payment forms ready! Are you? Before adding a payment field in your form and calling it a day, it's important to consider the negative impact that complicated and poorly designed payment forms can have on your conversions. 

In today's market, customers expect the ability to easily make payments as soon as they are done adding items to their cart. Based on the above stated facts, making the payment checkout process straight forward and easy-to-understand will clearly improve your conversion rates. Whether it's a small business that wants to build their own e-commerce payment form or a newsletter subscription form to collect monthly payments, if you're not making the steps easy, you're not making money!

We will be discussing various use cases and best practices that you can follow for designing your payment forms in our upcoming fortnight series. The first series, today, is about creating a workflow to accept payments based on the options your customers select. Let's get into it!

Collecting payments based on user's choice

For a form where only a field's selection of your customer is going to decide the payment, you can automatically prefill the selected option's value as the payment amount. Assume you have a Newsletter Subscription form where the customer needs to choose the subscription type and make the payment. When you list your answer choices (6 months/one year), you need to assign values for each choice you've listed. These assigned values should be equal to the payment amount you want to collect. A quick tip I'll give you is to use only the Radio/Dropdown fields to list your choices so that the customer is choosing only one option and not more than that!

When including the payment field into your form, choose this field as the payment amount as you configure it. Now when your customers choose a specific subscription type, the corresponding payment amount gets auto filled in the payment field! If you are selling a product, including images (use image choices field) can be a great way to interact with your customers and motivate them to check out! Assign values to each image as we discussed above, and later, in your payment field, you can configure that field as the payment amount.

Collecting payments based on a calculated value

The above discussed configuration is used only when the payment amount is based on a single field's choice. If you are creating a form where the total payment amount is going to be based on more than one value, you need to involve calculations to work out the total value. For instance, let's look at an order form where the customer might purchase as many orders as they want.

Here, the Item and Quantity decides the payment amount. You can apply a formula for this using the Formula field and choose that formula field as the payment amount. Let me show you another example where two orders are placed in a single form, i.e for a vase and flowers.

To sum this up for the total payment amount, you can enter the expression Glass Vase total + Flowers total amount . Not only the fields can be involved in the calculations. You can also add numerical values as a part of the calculation as well. For example, when you want to add a Shipping Charges (say, $20), for any subscription plan they choose, you can frame the expression as shown below.

That's a wrap! Check out our different payment options and the configuration instructions to get started. Do you have anything else to add? Comment below - we'd love to hear from you!

Until next fortnight,

Prasana

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