With payments set up by Direct Debit, it can be a few days before you receive your money. However, Instant Bank Pay from GoCardless is designed to complement bank debit using Open Banking. These bank-to-bank payments are confirmed instantly, so if you are running an online store you can more confidently ship goods or allow access to your online content straight away. Instant Bank Pay (IBP) is currently for merchants and customers in the UK and Germany. You’ll see the IBP options in your form feeds when your Gravity Forms default currency is set to Pound Sterling or Euros.

• Instant confirmation – Real time confirmation for you and your customers
• Streamlined for mobile apps – You’ll be up to speed with the trend to shop via smartphones.
• No card details required – the customer confirms the transaction directly with their bank through their banking app or via online banking. No need to dig out a card or share its 3-digit security code.
• Lower fees – Instant Bank Pay is typically 25% cheaper than online card transactions.
• Save on admin – Spend less time chasing down late or failed payments.

Instant Bank Pay is designed for one-off payments, but WPdirectdebit gives you the flexibility to combine an initial payment taken by Instant Bank Pay with a recurring payment sequence collected by Direct Debit. Perhaps you sell online courses. You can grant instant access to your course materials and rest assured that further payments will be taken at the appropriate times with no further interaction needed. Or maybe you run a club and wish to charge a joining fee followed by regular subscription payments of a different amount. This can all be done with just one form and an Instant Bank Pay with Recurring Payment feed.

Try Instant Bank Pay for yourself here on the GoCardless site.

Setting up an IBP single payment form

Create a new form and save it.

We’ll add some fields later. In the form settings, select GoCardless and add a new feed.

Then, from the list of actions, select Instant Bank Pay (IBP). IBP is currently for merchants and customers based in the UK or Germany and, if you are not seeing the IBP options in your form feeds this is because your Gravity Forms default currency is not set to Pound Sterling or Euros.

Enter a payment description. As this will appear on GoCardless emails, it should be meaningful to the customer, reminding them what the payment is for (maximum 255 characters).

If the transaction amount will always be the same for this form, enter this amount in the Amount field. (The currency applied will be the default currency selected in the Gravity Forms settings. You should not try and mix currencies on different forms.) There is no need to include a currency symbol, e.g. for £25.59 enter 25.59

If you don’t know the transaction amount because it will be entered by the customer, or will depend on entries on the form itself, leave the amount field blank.

Select either Disable or Enable for the Fallback setting. Fallback gives the customer the option to pay by Direct Debit if their payment cannot complete because their bank is not listed or bank authorisation fails.

Save your form.

Adding fields to your form

If all you want to do is set up a single payment of a fixed amount, you don’t need any fields on your form. You only actually need a Submit button, which is added automatically to your form.

But in most instances you will want to add various fields. Here are our recommendations.

A Name field, an Address field and an Email field

You can use these to pre-populate the GoCardless Instant Bank Pay checkout flow, but be aware that the customer can edit these during the checkout process, so the data captured on your form might not match the payee’s information. So these fields are for convenience only.

If you add any of these fields, you’ll need to map the fields in the form’s feed settings, in the Form Prefilling section.

If you are dispatching goods then you might also wish to add a shipping address field. That means you’ll have two address fields on your form so be sure to check you have matched the correct address fields.

If your customer has an account on your website and is logged in, WPdirectdebit will attempt to pre-fill these fields for you, to make life easier for your customer. If there is a GoCardless customer ID stored with the user profile, the customer record is accessed and used to pre-populate form. If there is no stored Customer ID, the user’s profile fields will be used.

A currency field

This is optional. If you do not add a currency field to your form, the default currency will be pre-selected for the payment; this is the currency selected in your Gravity Forms settings. Instant Bank Pay is available in Germany and the UK so, for example, if you are a UK-based merchant but expect some of your customers will be based in Germany you might want to allow them to switch the currency to Euros. Adding a currency field will allow them to do this on your form.

The customer will also have the option to change the currency within the checkout flow, so just like the name and address fields, this is doing nothing more than pre-filling the Instant Bank Pay checkout flow. The actual currency set up for the payment could be different.

Here’s how you should add a drop-down field to create a currency selector. (You could instead use Radio buttons to accomplish the same thing.) You can use different labels, but the values must be as shown, using the three-letter ISO 4217 Currency Codes.

Once you have added the currency field, map it in the form’s feed settings. If you don’t have a currency field, be sure to leave this unmapped. (An unmapped field will display ‘Select a Field’.)

Product fields and a Total field

The Gravity Forms form editor provides a group of fields called Pricing Fields. Adding these to your form brings you a great deal of flexibility to describe your product, add quantities, the option of a user-defined price (perfect for donations), product options, shipping and more. More information.

If you have more than one product field, add a Total field which will contain the sum of all amounts from the product fields.

Here we’ve added a user-defined pricing field to collect donations.

Then on the form feed, leave the Amount blank and use the drop-down selector to map the Amount to amount field (usually this is the Total field). The amount in the mapped field will be validated against the transaction minimum and transaction limit defined in the Gravity Forms GoCardless settings and when the form is submitted, this amount will be submitted to GoCardless for processing.

If you’d prefer to offer the customer a set of fixed choices, perhaps to accept donations with suggested amounts, you could change the field type of your product field to use selector buttons or a drop-menu menu instead, like this:

This will create a payment section field like this:

Terms and conditions

It is always a good idea to get a record of the customer accepting your terms and conditions before you take their money. The Gravity Forms Consent field allows you to offer a “yes/no” consent checkbox and a detailed description of what is being consented to. It is available under the Advanced Fields section within the form editor. This is just for your use and won’t play any part in the GoCardless payment processing.

Post-processing settings

GoCardless will need the URL of a page on your website to redirect the customer back to after completing the checkout flow. You should set up a thank-you page landing page where you can tell the customer what to expect now that their payment has been made. Similarly, if payment fails or is abandoned, you’ll need to denote the page that the customer will be redirected to in this instance. If you offer a choice of payment methods then this page may be the payment selection page.

Finally you should enter a short message that will be displayed on-screen whenever a payment is abandoned or fails.

Conditional logic

By default, the form will be passed to WPdirectdebit for processing, and from there, over to GoCardless, however you can disable this using conditional logic. For example, perhaps you also offer payment by credit card or by PayPal. By adding a payment method field to your form, the user can select their preferred payment method. With conditional logic you can test this field to find out which method they prefer and then disable all but the selected method. This avoids the possibility of them paying more than once.

An example Instant Bank Pay form

Here’s what our single payment form looks like when embedded into a page on this website. Note that the style is automatically picked up from your active theme’s style.

Setting up the form feed

Gravity Forms passes the form entries over to each of the active feeds for the form. WPdirectdebit processes the data and passes it to GoCardless. Read more about Gravity Forms feeds.

Here’s how our donation from looks in the form’s feed settings.

Notifications

Notifications are not essential but recommended. These are emails that are automatically sent when selected events occur related to form submissions.

The default notification is to send an email to the site admininstrator. You’ll probably want to add a notification for the customer to remind them what they ordered, and here you can add any other information that you’d like the customer to know at this stage: your returns policy, customer service contact details etc. More information here.

Adding the form to your site

Gravity forms are embedded using shortcodes like this:

[gravityform id="67" title="true" description="true"]

Refer to the Gravity Forms documentation for more information.