How to Enable ACH With Stripe and MemberPress?

Automated Clearing House (ACH) Direct Debit is a bank debit payment method available in the United States. This payment method allows direct payments between US-based bank accounts.

MemberPress integration with Stripe allows you to receive payments through ACH. This document will show you how to set this up and provide more details on ACH Direct Debit. 

Receiving Payments With ACH

ACH is supported only through the built-in MemberPress integration with Stripe. Thus, before enabling ACH, please connect Stripe to MemberPress on your site, and test the connection to make sure it’s functioning well.

After your Stripe connection is properly set, please enable ACH as the payment method in your Stripe account, and then in MemberPress. You will find the ACH option in your Stripe account by navigating to Settings > Payment Methods and scrolling down to the “Bank debits” section.

Please check more details on setting this up in the “How To Enable Payment Methods With Stripe and Memberpress” document.

Note: Your Stripe payment form will show ACH as a payment method when you toggle on the ACH Direct Debit option in MemberPress settings. Please keep in mind that ACH will be available on your forms, even if it's not enabled as a payment method in your Stripe account. To avoid any possible issues, please make sure that ACH is enabled in your Stripe account before enabling it in MemberPress.

Once ACH is enabled, your membership registration forms will show this new payment option. The ACH payment option will be available on both Stripe Checkout and Stripe Element forms. 

On the registration form, customers will be asked to provide their name, email, and to sign in to their bank account to provide their bank account information. Also, users will need to authorize your merchant mandate allowing your company to debit their account, before submitting the registration form.

What’s Important to Know About Using ACH?

ACH Direct Debit can be used as a payment method for both recurring and non-recurring payments. Also, ACH supports memberships with free or paid trials.

On the other hand, the ACH payment option will show only if all conditions are met, as the integration comes with several limitations imposed by ACH or Stripe. 

Namely, ACH is only available to your users with US bank accounts, and it only supports payments in US Dollars. Accordingly, to use ACH with MemberPress, please ensure that the currency in MemberPress settings is set to USD. 

In addition, both the country selected for your Stripe account and the country set in your MemberPress settings must be the United States.

Finally, please keep in mind that ACH is a delayed notification payment method. This means that it will take up to 4 business days to process the payment and send the notification of success or failure to MemberPress.

Note: Pausing or canceling recurring subscriptions will not stop any payments that are already in processing. Thus, payments initiated on a date before the subscription was paused or canceled, will still be processed. All payments scheduled for processing after the date when the subscription is paused or canceled, won't be processed.

By default, MemberPress creates subscriptions on your site with a 1-day grace period to compensate for the payment processing time. In this case, you would need to extend the default grace period to 6 days (to cover 4 business days and a possibility of 2 weekend days occurring in between). Otherwise, your users might be without access to your protected content.

You can find more information about ACH Direct Debit payments in Stripe documentation.