Payment Notification Setup

Most payment services support the ability to notify your site of a payment event (e.g. successful or failed charges). This is typically done by your site providing a URL that the payment service can use to provide notifications. These URLs go by a variety of terms. You will hear callback and webhook used quite often. Keep in mind that fundamentally, you are creating an end-point just like your regular web pages. The biggest difference is that this end-point doesn’t return HTML for rendering. The Stripe plugin sends email receipts in the payment notification callback. You must configure this correctly to generate email receipts.

Configuration

There are two steps to complete before payment notifications will work. You must configure both ends of the system. The Stripe plugin provides a setting to create the ‘page’ that handles the notification. Stripe provides a panel to set the end-point.

Configuring The Plugin

The plugin provides a Setup tab for configuration. There is a ‘Web Hook URL’ section for configuring the webhook. It looks something like the following:

This field should be configured with the page name that you desire for payment notification. This is not the full URL. When you save the options, the plugin will create a page with that name that uses a WordPress special template (provided with the plugin). This template provides all the payment notification processing. It is worth emphasizing that following points:

• Provide the page name (e.g. payment-webhook) not the full URL.
• The plugin will create a WordPress page with that name.
• The URL used to configure stripe will be generated and shown.

Configuring Stripe

Stripe provides a ‘Webhook’ configuration area that looks like the following:

When configuring Stripe, you need to provide the full URL. It is recommended that you copy and paste from the setup page (example shown above). You also need to be careful to provide the final end-point as Stripe does not follow redirects. As an example, if you were to provide http://google.com as your end-point it would not work. Not because you don’t own that domain, but because that URL redirects to http://www.google.com. Go ahead and click the first link to see what I mean. While you are configuring Stripe, be sure to configure both a ‘Test’ and a ‘Live’ webhook.

Once you have everything configured, do a quick test by clicking the ‘Test Webhooks’ button and send a test event to each of your end-points. If you have everything configured correctly you will get a nice Test webhook sent successfully message. If you don’t have everything configured correctly you will receive a Test webhook error: 404 message.

Summary

That’s it. Once you have the plugin and the Stripe service configured, customers should begin receiving emails after submitting a payment form. Emails are sent using the WordPress wp_mail function. If you have questions or issues, please contact support@diglabs.com.