The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Direct Debit is a bank debit payment method introduced by the European Union. This payment method enables direct payments between Euro-based bank accounts within or between European Union member countries. MemberPress integration with Stripe allows you to receive payments through SEPA.
This document will guide you through the setup process and provide additional details on using SEPA with Stripe and MemberPress.
Receiving Payments With SEPA
MemberPress supports SEPA as a payment method only through the built-in integration with Stripe. Therefore, before enabling SEPA, please connect Stripe to MemberPress on your site. Also, test the connection to ensure it is functioning correctly.
After you set and test your Stripe connection, follow these steps to enable SEPA on your MemberPress registration forms:
- Log in to your Stripe account and navigate to Settings > Payment Methods.
- Scroll down to the Bank debits section and set SEPA as a payment method.
- Next, log in to your website Dashboard.
- Navigate to Dashboard > MemberPress > Payments tab and enable SEPA in MemberPress.
As a result, your membership registration forms will now show SEPA as a payment option. The SEPA 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 and bank account number in IBAN format. Further, by submitting their payment data, they are accepting a mandate that 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 only be displayed if all conditions are met. SEPA integration comes with several limitations imposed by SEPA or Stripe.
Firstly, as mentioned, SEPA is a payment method primarily for the European Union countries. As such, it supports payments only between EUR-denominated bank accounts within the SEPA region. Therefore, to use SEPA with MemberPress, you must set the currency in MemberPress settings to EUR.
Next, you must set your (merchant) country to one of the countries supported for SEPA. You can find the list of countries within the SEPA region on the European Central Bank's website. Additionally, some countries outside the SEPA region can also accept SEPA Direct Debit payments with local currency settlement.
Furthermore, you must set the same supported country both in your MemberPress settings and Stripe account. Supported countries are:
- 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,
- United States.
Managing the Delayed Payment Method
Finally, please note that SEPA is a delayed notification payment method. Accordingly, it will take up to 14 days to process the payment and send the notification of success or failure to MemberPress.
By default, MemberPress creates subscriptions on your site with a 1-day grace period to compensate for processing time. Hence, you would need to extend the default grace period to 14 days. Otherwise, your users might be without access to your protected content until you receive the payment.
You can find more information about SEPA payments in the Stripe documentation.
