To sign up your visitors to make payments, you’ll need a form for them to complete. WPdirectdebit uses the basic Gravity Forms plugin for this. Gravity Forms saves the completed forms within your WordPress database and WPdirectdebit validates and filters the information on the form before passing it over to GoCardless.

You’ll probably want to collect your customers’ names and email addresses, and other data. You can also add fields to your form to allow your visitors to decide how much and how often to pay you, if you want to allow them that flexibility. You may also wish to add check boxes to accept terms and conditions. In the United Kingdom, you could include a field to approve Gift Aid, if you are collecting donations for a charity.

Gravity Forms is well-documented so please check out their documentation if you are unfamiliar with creating a form, form feeds, confirmations and notifications.

The types of form we are interested in fall into these categories:

• Instant bank pay (IBP): To take a one-off payment e.g. for a simple purchase via open banking (UK and Germany only for now). The chief advantage of Instant Bank Pay is that the bank account is verified ‘instantly’ and so the money is available shortly after the form is submitted. You can dispatch goods without waiting for payment.
• IBP + Recurring payment: For when you wish to combine Instant Bank Pay with setting up a recurring payment. Useful for when you want to set up a recurring payment starting immediately, or when you wish to take an initial payment such as a joining fee, followed by regular subscriptions payments. These two payment types could be for differing amounts. You can also use IBP + Recurring payment if you want to give the user the option of a single payment or a recurring payment – normally this would require two separate forms.
• Recurring payment: To set up a payment that repeats at regular intervals – weekly, monthly or yearly. Multiples of these intervals are also possible. This is useful for subscriptions or repeat donations. The first recurring payment in a sequence will not be taken for a few days. If this presents a problem, use IBP + Recurring payment where available.
• Verified Mandate: A verified mandate means you can take payments from the customer at a later date via your GoCardless dashboard. It’s also a good way to check that the customer has access to a bank account, because to set up a verified mandate, they will log on to their bank via a banking app or online banking.

See the documentation for guidance on creating each type of form.