How to Enable Bacs With Stripe and MemberPress?

Bacs Direct Debit is a bank debit payment method available in the United Kingdom. This payment method allows direct payments between UK-based bank accounts.

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

Receiving Payments With Bacs

Bacs is supported only through the built-in MemberPress integration with Stripe. Thus, before enabling Bacs, 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 Bacs as the payment method in your Stripe account, and then in MemberPress. You will find the Bacs 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.

Also, to enable Bacs Direct Debit in your Stripe account, you will need to complete additional identity verification steps required by Stripe.

Note: Your Stripe payment form will show Bacs as a payment method when you toggle on the Bacs option in MemberPress settings. Please keep in mind that Bacs 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 Bacs is enabled in your Stripe account before enabling it in MemberPress.

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

On the registration form, customers will be asked to provide the sort code, account number, name, email, and full address. Further, by submitting their payment data they will be authorizing you to collect a mandate (Direct Debit Instruction) which authorizes your company to debit their account. 

What’s Important to Know About Using Bacs?

The Bacs payment option will show only if all conditions are met, as Bacs integration comes with several limitations imposed by Bacs or Stripe. 

Bacs Direct Debit can be used as a payment method for both recurring and non-recurring payments. Also, Bacs does support delayed payments, but not the free ones. Accordingly, Bacs as a payment option will not be available for memberships with free trials.

Further, Bacs is only available to your users with United Kingdom bank accounts, and it only supports payments in Pounds Sterling (Great British Pound). Accordingly, to use Bacs with MemberPress, please make sure that the currency in MemberPress settings is set to GBP. 

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

Finally, please keep in mind that Bacs is a delayed notification payment method. This means that it will take up to 6 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 8 days or more), as otherwise, your users might be without access to your protected content.

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