How to Enable Sofort With Stripe and MemberPress?

Sofort is a bank redirect payment method powered by Klarna. This payment method is especially popular in Germany and Austria and allows customers to do online payments from their bank account.

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

Receiving Payments With Sofort

Sofort is supported only through the built-in MemberPress integration with Stripe. Thus, before enabling Sofort, 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 Sofort as payment method in your Stripe account, and then in MemberPress. You will find the Sofort option in your Stripe account by navigating to Settings > Payment Methods and scrolling down to the “Bank redirects” 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 Sofort as a payment method when you toggle on the Sofort option in MemberPress settings. Please keep in mind that Sofort 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 Sofort is enabled in your Stripe account before enabling it in MemberPress.

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

When your users submit the registration form, they will be redirected to their bank’s portal to authenticate the payment and returned to your site. 

What’s Important to Know About Using Sofort?

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

Firstly, it’s important to mention that Sofort can only be used for non-recurring payments. Thus, this payment method will not be visible on the registration pages of your recurring memberships. Also, Sofort doesn’t support delayed payments. Accordingly, Sofort as a payment option will not be available for memberships with free or paid trials.

Further, Sofort is only available to users from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain.  Thus, to use Sofort with MemberPress, please make sure that the currency in MemberPress settings is set to EUR. 

In addition, your Stripe account needs to be set to one of the following countries to receive payments from your customers through Sofort: 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, or United States.

Also, please keep in mind that Sofort is a delayed notification payment method. This means that it will usually take 2 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 Sofort payments in Stripe documentation.