How to Enable SEPA With Stripe and MemberPress?

Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Direct Debit is a bank debit payment method launched by the European Union. This payment method allows direct payments between Euro-based bank accounts within and between the European Union member countries.

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

Receiving Payments With SEPA

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

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

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

On the registration form, customers will be asked to provide their name and bank account number in IBAN format. Further, by submitting their payment data they will be accepting a mandate which authorizes your company to debit their account. 

What’s Important to Know About Using SEPA?

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

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

Firstly, as mentioned, SEPA is a payment method created for the European Union, and as such supports payments only between EUR-denominated bank accounts within the SEPA region. You can check the list of countries within the SEPA region on the website of the European Central Bank. In addition, some countries outside of the SEPA region can also accept SEPA Direct Debit payments with local currency settlement. 

Thus, it’s important to mention that both the country selected for your Stripe account, and the country set in your MemberPress settings, need to be one of the countries supported for SEPA by Stripe: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States.

Also, to use SEPA with MemberPress, please make sure that the currency in MemberPress settings is set to EUR. 

Finally, please keep in mind that SEPA is a delayed notification payment method. This means that it will take up to 14 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 14 days, as otherwise, your users might be without access to your protected content.

You can find more information about SEPA payments in Stripe documentation.