How to set up and offer a better student experience with PayPal Recurring Payments

Your relationship with your students is essential to your business. We get that. So, when you let us know you needed deeper PayPal capabilities—namely, a way to let your students pay for recurring payments via PayPal—we took action. To help both you and your students, we’re launching PayPal Recurring Payments.

With PayPal Recurring Payments, creators utilizing Teachable Payments or Monthly Payment Gateway with BackOffice and PayPal enabled will now be able to offer PayPal as a payment option on monthly recurring payments, namely subscriptions or payment plans.

Students first

Offering your students recurring payments through PayPal means more peace of mind. Not only will expanding your recurring payment options to include PayPal automatic payments keep your students feeling secure and safe while shopping, but it may also reduce the likelihood of churn at checkout. And, hopefully keep you from losing out on potential revenue.

Thanks to PayPal’s trusted name, students will feel confident with their purchases and their payment information. They can also leverage PayPal’s own feature set to manage their automatic payments. Students who purchase a recurring payment product using their PayPal account can manage their recurring payments on both the Teachable platform and in their PayPal account directly. This flexibility allows students to update their payment method, request a refund, cancel their subscriptions, or leverage any of the other unique capabilities PayPal and the PayPal app provide.

It’s your students’ money and it’s in their control.

A world of options

But it’s not just your students who will benefit from the world of options. You will as well.

We know some creators have hesitated to offer recurring payment options or subscriptions because PayPal wasn’t available for those particular pricing options. If that sounds like you, consider PayPal Recurring Payments a way to expand your offerings.

The functionality of PayPal Recurring Payments will be nearly identical to the existing recurring payments offerings we have on the Teachable platform. You’ll still be able to sell your products to students via payments over a period of time of your choosing. And students will still gain access to your content over that designated timeframe and can cancel at any time they wish.

You’ll both just have the added benefit of PayPal as a payment option. To use, your student will just need to set up a PayPal account. (Note: If a student applies a coupon or selects an order bump while purchasing a recurring payment product, the PayPal payment method will not be available to use.)

Need a refresher on the recurring payment options we have at Teachable? See below for which one may be best for you.

Subscriptions

In the subscription option, students will have access to your product as long as they continue to pay for the course. You can set your subscription to charge monthly. The billing cycles are determined based on the date the student enrolls. In this instance, student will see a PayPal monthly payment on their bill.

Subscriptions are great for creators who have content to continually deliver or update. They’re also ideal for those creators who want to offer a coaching or group learning component on a regular basis. They can even work well to help market an online community.

Payment plans

With this option, students pay a set amount of monthly fees for indefinite full access to your product. Not only do payment plans mean you can offer more budget-friendly payment options to students, but they’re also particularly impactful for courses with higher price tags.

Our new PayPal Recurring Payments option will ultimately give both students and creators a sense of control, flexibility, and security.

PayPal Recurring Payments: Easily enabled

Taking advantage of the new PayPal Recurring Payments feature is easy. Simply, utilize Teachable Payments or Monthly Payment Gateway, our native payment gateways, and enable BackOffice and PayPal.

BackOffice, our suite of services that make the financial logistics of managing an online course a breeze, will now allow you to set up recurring payments on PayPal on all of your recurring payment products.

If you haven’t enabled BackOffice through Teachable Payments onboarding—or if you’re using the Monthly Payment Gateway—opt-in to BackOffice by completing the following steps:

• Log in to your Teachable school
• Click on Settings in the admin sidebar and navigate to the Payments section

In the Teachable BackOffice section, click on the Enable Teachable BackOffice button.

• Click Enable BackOffice to confirm. Alternatively, if you want to disable BackOffice, you can click on the Disable Teachable BackOffice button.

It’s that simple. We want the best for your business, so we’re delivering our best. Enable BackOffice today so you can get started expanding your offerings and set up recurring payments on PayPal for your students today.