How To Use WooCommerce To Email An Invoice With A “Pay Now” Link?

Are you wasting a large amount of your time and energy on collecting payments from customers? A Pay Now link in the WooCommerce invoices sent to your customers might be the right solution here. In this article, we’ll explain how to use WooCommerce to email an invoice with a ‘Pay Now’ Link using the WooCommerce PDF Invoices, Packing Slips and Credit Notes plugin.

When you don’t have a point-of-sale (POS) or want to accept payments at a later time suitable for the customers, “Pay Now” links in WooCommerce (also known as invoice links) can be a very helpful feature. With it, you can also collect payments in the interim of the checkout and delivery payment stages.

This would make payments much quicker and easier. It also reduces the chances of late payments.

With the Pay Now link, you can offer your customers a different payment method that allows them to complete transactions easily. That’s why a ‘Pay Now’ link sent via email is the perfect solution for almost any business, including retailers and wholesalers.

An invoice payment link or a WooCommerce Pay Later link is a payment button added to the generated PDF invoices of your store. This button aims to simplify requesting payments from clients for your goods and services.

The PDF invoices with the payment button attached can be sent to your customers as emails. This enables customers to seamlessly make payments from their email inbox by clicking the button and providing the payment details.

The WooCommerce invoice payment links are a common requirement for several types of WooCommerce stores. Let’s take a look at some of them here.

Businesses (or service providers) that don’t usually take payments from the store can rely on the invoice payment links to receive payments. For example, a custom printing shop might only be able to get an accurate price estimate once the job is completed. So they would not be able to charge customers from the store but can do so with the ‘Pay Now’ link attached to the WooCommerce invoices sent out as email attachments to customers.

B2B companies also often employ invoice payment links to collect payment from the companies they are trading with. Smaller companies catering to individual customers also use these invoice payment links to receive payments. They usually do this when they don’t have a POS (point of sale) set up.

‘Pay Now’ links make it easy and secure to accept payments anywhere.

The following are the main advantages for both businesses and customers:

• Improve your workflow and payment process so you can receive payments faster and spend more time on important tasks like expanding your business.
• Sharing the link through email and allowing customers to pay using any device will all enhance the customer experience.
• Maintaining a competitive edge and providing secure payment methods will increase customer trust and loyalty.
• Keeping track of transaction history on a single, user-friendly dashboard with updates in real-time.
• With ‘Pay Now’ links, you can cut down your business cost by eliminating the use of point of sale (POS) devices, and more.
• Accepting a broader range of payment options, including credit cards, electronic wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and other payment options.
• Increasing client satisfaction and taking the most widely used payment methods can increase your conversion rate and overall revenue.
• Setting up invoice emails and attaching the payment link to them demands minimal work. Therefore it is often easier for businesses to collect payments via this method.
• The convenience of their email inbox and a redirect button often leads to quicker customer payments.

Using the WooCommerce PDF Invoices, Packing Slips, & Credit Notes plugin, you can disable accepting payments at the checkout by adding a ‘Pay Later’ option. Additionally, the customer can make the payment directly through the ‘Pay Now‘ link on their invoice receipt.

Let’s get started.

Prerequisite

You will need to install and activate the free version of the WooCommerce PDF Invoice, Packing Slips, Delivery Notes, and Shipping Labels plugin for the premium version of the plugin to get activated.

Follow the instructions given below to install and activate both plugins.

1. On your WordPress admin console, go to Plugins > Add New.
2. Search for ‘WooCommerce PDF Invoices, Packing Slips, Delivery Notes, and Shipping Labels’.
3. Locate the WebToffee plugin and click on Install Now, and then on Activate.

4. Now, click on Upload Plugin and choose the zip file that you received upon purchasing the WooCommerce PDF Invoices, Packing Slips and Credit Notes plugin.
5. Once the upload is complete, click on Install Now. Then tap on Activate Plugin.

Add Pay Now Link In WooCommerce Invoice

Now, to set up the ‘Pay Now’ link in the PDF Invoice email sent out to customers,

1. Navigate to Invoice/Packing > Invoice tab from the left navigation bar. This will take you to the invoice settings window.
2. Configure the required invoice settings. Refer to this article on making WooCommerce PDF invoices to learn more.
3. To set up the Pay Now link scroll down to the Payment link in the General tab.
4. Check the box corresponding to the Show payment link on invoice. This will add a payment link near the payment method in the invoice.

5. Now choose the order status emails to which the payment links are to be attached. The available options include Pending payment, On hold, and Failed. If no option is selected, On hold status will be considered.
6. If you want your users to have an additional payment option – that is to pay later, you can do so by enabling ‘pay later at checkout’.
7. If ‘pay later’ is enabled, you can change the title, description, and instructions of that payment option.
8. Once this is done, click on Update Settings to make the changes public.

This is how the Pay Later link will appear at the checkout.

Users can now initiate payments by clicking the ‘Pay Now’ link on the invoice.

To add the ‘Pay Now’ links to the invoice templates,

1. Go to Invoice/Packing > Invoice > Customize.
2. Click on Change layout and select a layout that is suitable for you. You will have to select one among the three Pro templates (PRO – 1, PRO – 2, or PRO – 3) to avail of the ‘payment link’ option.

3. On the left-hand side of the screen, there are several options that you can enable, disable or customize.
4. Scroll down to the Payment Link option and make sure it is toggled on.
5. Click on the Payment Link drop-down and change the label if required.

6. Click on Save to save the changes made to a template. Provide a template name and then save the template.

Here is the invoice preview with the Pay Now link shown in the Customize tab.

Activating Invoice Template Created

To activate the invoice template that you have just created,

1. Click on the three horizontal lines next to the Cancel button.
2. Tap on Activate.

If you have more than one template, click on the three horizontal lines and then tap on My templates. You will be able to see all available templates there. You can activate, edit or delete the templates from there.

When an order is placed using the Pay Later option at checkout, the order status automatically changes to On-hold. This order status will trigger adding the Payment link to the invoice.

When the customer receives the order invoice from the store, the Pay Now link will be added to it. Here is a sample of such an invoice.

When clicking on this link, the customer will be taken to the checkout, where they can use the available payment methods the store offers to complete the payment. When the payment is completed, the order status automatically changes from ‘On hold’ to ‘Completed’.

Streamlining your business operations is important to your success. Give your customers a simple payment option with the ‘Pay Now’ Link sent via email to help grow your business. Customer satisfaction is greatly improved when using the ‘Pay Later’ option. Maintaining customer satisfaction will also enable you to run a profitable business.

Hope this article helped you address your queries. Have more questions? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.