topic Re: One time payments vs payment plans in Commerce Tools

One time payments vs payment plans

joshkimber — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 19:00:55 GMT

I’m hoping to get some insight from others who have experience with this. We offer educational classes and are seeing a pretty even split between folks who want to pay in full and those who need a payment plan.

One-time payments are simple—we're using HubSpot payment links and they work great.
But for payment plans, we’re still figuring out the best approach.

Has anyone successfully set up a way to offer payment plans online? Do you do it through your website? Or do you collect interest and then send a link manually via email?

Ideally, we’d love to create a more self-service experience where someone selects a plan and pays directly—but my gut says that’s probably too complex with the current tools.

Right now, I’m leaning toward having a form where users select their preferred payment option, then we send a tailored link in an email based on their choice. Would love to hear how others are handling this!

Re: One time payments vs payment plans

BérangèreL — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 07:01:08 GMT

Hi @joshkimber, I hope that you are well!

Thanks for asking the HubSpot Community and for the context!

For information, here are some articles on the topic:

- Manage recurring billing and payments with subscriptions
- HubSpot payments | Frequently asked questions

I'd love to put you in touch with our Top Experts: Hi @bendonahower, @MrJustinGivens, @danmoyle and @LouiseHare from your experiences, do you have suggestions to help @joshkimber, please?

By the way @joshkimber, I see that you offer educational classes, not sure if you are already using these, but we have a "courses" dataset that might be of interest!

Have a beautiful day and thanks so much for your help! ⭐
Bérangère

Re: One time payments vs payment plans

RSchweighart — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 21:05:11 GMT

Hi @joshkimber, a potential solution would be to create a payment link for each payment option you want to offer. The key piece is to leverage the properties in the billing section to set up future payments.

Here's an example of a payment link with a full-payment.

Here's an example of a payment link with a set number of recurring payments.

If you want to charge interest, I think you'd just incorporate that into the monthly payment assuming that's OK from your bookkeeping perspective.

In practice you can leverage these payment links on your website, in an email, etc. When you create the links, you can view them to see what it looks like from a customer's perspective.

The first link @BérangèreL shared is a great, detailed resource.

All the Best,

Ryan Schweighart

Whole Hart Impact, LLC

whimpact.co

I help organizations use HubSpot and Zapier.

Re: One time payments vs payment plans

danmoyle — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:49:07 GMT

Hey there @joshkimber - very interesting use case here.

And thanks for the tag @BérangèreL!

I like your idea for the form asking them their preference. From there, I'd think about a workflow that emails them the payment link (like @RSchweighart described) that works best for them.

For the pay-in-full folks, it's that one email and payment link. For the other folks, you might have options for 2 payments, or other ways to break it up. Whichever path they choose, you vould have specific payment links that reflect the total cost broken down, and send the email reminders each month (or whatever time cadence is based of their number of payments),

Theres probably many ways to do this, maybe even with a third-party payment scheduling solution, but that's how I'm thinking of it personally. Hope that helps add to your thought experiment!