The short answer is really short. It’s not that complicated at all. But let me show you.
Wait…what is Chargify?
Chargify is a subscription management service. In other words, it helps you charge customers on a recurring basis.
You know, like charging a customer every single month, for access to your protected content on your WordPress site.
Sound familiar? Remember that series I worked on to evaluate 30 membership plugins to tell you which were the best?
Well, this is another way you might think build that kind of solution.
When should I use Chargify?
About now you’re thinking – wait, can’t I use PayPal or Stripe? And the answer is, not exactly, but kind of.
PayPal and Stripe are payment gateways. Each can do some subscription processing, which is where Chargify comes in.
But Chargify is as focused on subscription processing as Stripe or PayPal is on payment gateway work. They want to give you tons of options when it comes to subscriptions.
What that means is that if you’re doing a simple subscription site, using the other plugins and/or payment gateways may get you what you want.
But if you’re looking to handle more nuanced complexities around a subscription, you’re going to want to look at Chargify.
Let’s look at the list of “problems” they’re known to solve:
Metered Billing – need to charge clients for what they use?
Tiered Pricing – need to stair-step pricing?
Specific date or sign-up-based billing – want everyone paying on the 1st?
Multi-Currency support – Need to charge in a different currency?
As you can see, these are not issues that are often solved across the board in WordPress plugins.
Don’t get me wrong, the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension (which just got an update) is awesome. Maybe the best in the WordPress space. But it’s not at the Chargify level yet.
So if you need that kind of stuff…you’d want to check out Chargify.
Is it easy to create the kinds of products I want to create?
Yes. Very easy. Let me show you.
You get to create products and define how the charges work. It’s a simple form on the Chargify site.
And for each product, you can create the sales pages. And you get options – like whether you’re going to collect credit card info on signup, or whether you’re getting the billing address right away.
As you can imagine, if you don’t collect some of this info, you might find higher conversion rates. But either way, you’ll also get to add the return URL so that you can send people to the right place after the signup is complete.
And did I mention there’s support for custom fields?
How do I integrate it with WordPress?
Now, if you look at the ugly sales page for the subscription you just created, you might start thinking it’s time to look elsewhere.
But trust me, using the API makes things way better. And that means you are going to want to use the Chargify / WordPress plugin – created by my friends at 9seeds.
Note: don’t let the low install count or poor rating confuse you. It was recently overhauled and the feedback is for an older version of the product. It actually works great!
So let’s get started. Install the plugin and activate it.
Then put in your API keys.
Once you have that installed, you’ll be able to click on the Products tab and it will import everything you created in Chargify.
Click the “Enable” to make them available. Then you are going to want to configure the plugin to use the API instead of those ugly sales pages.
And once that’s in place, you’ll be set.
Except don’t forget to protect your content – which you can do at the bottom of each post or page.
That’s about it. Once it’s in place, you’ll see every protected post route people to the signup form and from there, it will create the WordPress user after the subscription has been processed, and automatically log users in.
That’s very cool!
You can see it working by looking in Chargify – on the Subscriptions tab.
So is my Chargify WordPress integration complete?
Well, the truth is that it doesn’t have to be. Chargify also does work with emails and customer relationship management. But not everyone uses Chargify for that.
So what if you want to use Infusionsoft or another CRM like Agile CRM?
Well, if you have Zapier, you can create a connection like I did.
And when a new subscription happens, the user is automatically put into Agile CRM. You can see my fake sign up below.
And if you do things right, you can combine these solutions to create autoresponders, campaigns based on products purchased and more.
The net result is that you’ll get to see it on Chargify’s more advanced reports – on churn, LTV and more.
So what are you waiting for?
I won’t lie – figuring this all out took a few hours. But that was because I was doing everything without the plugin. Once I found the plugin, things sped up quickly.
The good news for you? The plugin is already linked above. It works. Easily.
So for you, now, if you have a Chargify WordPress integration project, you should thrilled to know it’s easy and that you can do it quickly.
Good luck!