Introducing Payment Requests (now Invoices)
A new way for Paystack merchants to directly bill and invoice customers.
A lot of businesses on Paystack provide tailored services to their customers. This creates the need to request payments directly. Paystack provides a good number of ways to integrate and get paid, but sometimes, it’s not that deep, and you just want to say “Hey customer, Pay me XXX”.
We launched Payment Pages last year as a solution for collections. With this feature, anyone could set up a page and get a link to share with their customers. It turned out really well, and it let people jump right into Paystack without having to go through the ease of using the API or any of the plugins. But in many cases, it still wasn’t optimized.
Collections vs Direct Billing
There are many situations for which Payment Pages are ideal. Ticket Payments? Check. Group contributions? Check. Donations? Check again! Across all these use cases, it is clear that the feature is great for when you want to collect money from many people.
For direct customer billing however, it’s not the best. So we’re introducing another way: Payment Requests. What’s peculiar?
- Send directly to one customer. Choose or create a customer to request payment from.
- Let them know why you’re requesting payment. For goods you sold? For a service you offered? Include that message.
- Optionally create and attach an invoice. Create professionally designed invoices to attach to your request, if you need a little more formality.
- Reminders. We automatically remind the customer not to forget your payment. But in case you need a little more fire, you can send the reminders yourself.
- Know when you’re paid. We send you an email when the customer settles the bill.
How to start requesting
On your dashboard, go to the Payment Requests Menu on the sidebar to start making requests. You can send a simple request or create a more professional one, complete with an invoice.
You can also read the API documentation to request payments from your app. We’ve also added webhook events for payment requests.
We’ve rolled out Payment Requests to all users today. If you notice any quirks or have any feedback, please send us an email at >em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> or send us a tweet @paystack. We look forward to hearing from you.
