Lesson 8 - Stripe and PayPal: Payments and Subscriptions
Start an AI Automation Business📅 2024-07-31
Transcript
[00:00] welcome to the next lesson here where we're going to be looking at stripe and more specifically ways we handle payments subscriptions and anything that is imperative for us to know about when handling money in a automation agency business now one little tip before we jump into this it's always going to be easier for a business to do work with you if it's a one-time fee opposed to a recurring fee that's why a lot of the times the context a recurring fee would come into play is during an upsell model which you'll see in today video before
[00:31] we jump into the back end on stripe let's just go ahead and get an idea of what stripe even is as you see here stripe is known for its apis and its ability to really connect with a ton of different softwares which allows us to do a lot of cool stuff furthermore it is a globally accepted payment solution with a lot of effective features such as link which essentially allows a user if they've done a strip made payment in the past and have saved their data with their email that can check out with one click rather than going through an
[01:01] entire checkout process for your specific invoice or subscription now here at web Cafe AI we love the way they structure the recurring model and the different API calls we can do within it as it stands out as one of the most powerful tools within strip furthermore if you ever needed to do multiple payouts with their API you can do that which you know is always an issue I found with PayPal having to go through a lot of circles and Hoops in order to achieve different things with your API stripe really gives you access to their back end which is really really cool
[01:32] want to learn more I suggest you check out their website here and there's a bunch of different case studies here that you can explore more in depth about what stripe can do for your business as a side note here if stripe is not available within your country go ahead and use PayPal as an alternative everything you learned in today's lesson can still be applied to PayPal it's just the UI will probably look different right let's go ahead and begin we are in a test account here for stripe this is going to be all test data so none of this is real but for your reference when you first log into strip you're going to get a nice little dashboard here you're going to get the amount of money you
[02:03] made today and then you come down here you can go ahead and adjust all these different metrics with the dates over here such as gross volume net volume from sales new customers and so on let's go ahead and do the first most important thing when starting with the strip platform let's go ahead and create an invoice to do so we're going to come up here to our tabs here we're going to hit payments we're going to come over here to create payment hit invoice now that we have our invoice here we can go ahead and add relevant information for your reference as you
[02:33] see here we got our address here for web Cafe AI we got our logo a lot of this stuff is going to be set up in the settings which we can go ahead and show you after this little demo from here though we'll go ahead and add the customer or the person we'll be sending the invoice to in this context we could just hit add new customer You' put a name here put Tim let's do a whole name we'll do Tim Adams and then we'll do Tim Adams at gmail.com you would choose a language
[03:04] You' save that information here and then we have a ton of different pieces of information we need to provide so the first option here is to choose an item is this going to be a onetime item or is this going to be a reoccurring service you plan on selling multiple times in the context that you plan on using the same service and selling it to multiple businesses I suggest you to create a product so let's go ahead and do that we're going to go ahead and name it a I article generator do quantity of one and then
[03:36] whatever you would charge for this let's say we charge 400 and then you can choose whether to include tax or not let's go ahead and include tax here we to save and we're going to go ahead and now have the AI article generator placed on our invoice we're going to go ahead and request a payment here we can manage the payment methods here go ahead and select the ones that you want to work with this stripe invoice as you see can activate even more following this we're going to have a delivery type most of the time you're just going to want to email to the
[04:06] customer this direct link here and then finally we can add a ton of different information with the PDF here so for example add a memo in this context we could just do thanks for your business maybe you want to give a timeline this will be done in one to two weeks hit confirm and we come over here we can add more to the footer here so more information can be put on the footer we can add a custom field we can add a request for a text ID
[04:38] all in all we have our invoice we got our information here we got the client's information we got the description of the underlying service we're providing we could add more information here if we wanted to we can see what it looks like in an email really nice UI we can even see what the payment page would look like as you see here essentially when the individual clicks to pay they'll be brought to a page like this and as I said earlier they have integration with link essentially if this user has paid with stuff in the past with stripe there is a high probability they'll be able to pay directly with link automatically by
[05:10] just clicking okay perfect now you know how to set up an invoice for a potential client let's go ahead and see how we set up a recurring subscription to do so we're going to come over to products here and as you see here this was the AI article that we created on our invoice now for future invoices if we maintain the same price we can automatically input it and it'll have all the relevant information we provided to that invoice provided for that specific product subscription though we're going to go ahead and add a new product here and provide all the relevant information here let's go ahead and create a
[05:41] subscription for a maintenance go ahead and name it automation maintenance uh Provide support after installation so the idea behind this is that they'll pay a flat fee every single month to have access to support if something would to incur with the installation or the a automation you can provide an image here for the tax category you can go of general and services no I'm not a tax expert so don't take that to heart but in this context it should be fine from here we
[06:11] can go ahead and set our price so let's just say we want to set our price to 100 it's going to be recurring and then you would choose your monthly or weekly or daily time period for when it would get charged a lot of subscriptions are monthly so keep it at monthly from here we can go ahead and just hit save product perfect now we have have created a subscription product that essentially we could have the individual sign up for now let's say you create your payment link but you want to edit the checkout we can go ahead over here to edit and then we have a ton of different options we can choose from here I'm going to
[06:42] jump over here we can collect taxes automatically we could collect customers addresses require customer to provide a phone number include a free trial add custom fields that may be prevalent within your subscription here we have advanced options here such as promotion codes or allow the under business you're doing business with to provide a tax ID more we can go ahead and change what the post purchase would look like so in this context we got thanks for subscribing a payment of webcafe a.com will appear on your statement you could add a don't show the confirmation you can replace it
[07:14] with a custom message such as thank you for your business we look forward to providing maintenance and so on now on the stripe dashboard you'll be able to see all payments subscription or one time offs within the payment tab if you want to look at just subscription go to billing go to subscriptions and this will show all users that are currently subscribed to some product within your category okay perfect so now you know how to make an invoice you know how to make a subscription one other question that comes up a lot when it comes to
[07:45] financial management is how do I create a subscription where the individual has the AI automations run in our business's backend not the clients's businesses back in and here is our solution to that so in this context we will assume that you've already created your subscription you call it whatever you want to call it and maybe it's $1,000 a month due to the fact that you have to do with the AI automation the maintenance the supports everything's around on your backend so in this context if you're running your business like this where you host all the a automations in your backend you're
[08:15] going to be dealing with the underlying usage cost of the AI the usage cost of zapier and then overall support and maintenance of those automations now this may sound like a lot but in general a business model like this may be more fruitful due to the fact that you are doing reoccurring models rather than onetime payments with a business now in order to effectively do this type of model we need to make sure security is upmost priority therefore when you're operating and providing your services as a business it's always best to provide
[08:48] this option to businesses that are comfortable with your model and comfortable with your work that is why we need to use a password manager like one password coming up to one password Here If we go to their business plan this is going to be the plan you want to start using when you are developing clients and you're hosting their AI automations in your back end entally what this is going to allow you to do is set up different profiles associated with every single business and what's great is that every single one of those profiles won't see each other you will
[09:18] be the admin and every single profile and its Associated passwords will be provided for that business to be more clear essentially when you're onboarding that potential business they'll be provided a link to one password well they'll enter in all the readily available logins that you need to build out the AI automations for once you have all the readily available logins you'll be able to start doing work and you'll always have them secured within one password's back end never ever do any type of username or password transferring through email or text
[09:49] security needs to be held at an utmost priority the last thing you want on your plate as an a automation agency is you pass the passwords and usern name through email or text and then something happens where there was a hack on the account data was lost this all can come back and really bite you so really make sure that you're using top security like one password when handling password management now for your reference the package that you want to choose is going to be the business one this is going to cost around $8 a month now just to show
[10:21] you real quick this is Stripes documentation there is a ton of stuff when it comes to API calls that we can do with stripes documentation this is why we love this platform and what you'll learn in the further modules from now is how to access stuff like this so you can really do custom calls for either stripe or different platforms but we wanted to point that out real quick this is really why we love this platform okay now you know everything you need to know about setting up payments with stripe single time invoices subscription based and a way to handle passwords when
[10:52] you want to host the AI automations in your backend stripe is a very powerful tool there is no re curring cost to use stripe the way they make their money is based off transaction fees like any credit card processor so now that you know how to do financial management within your AI automation let's go ahead and jump into our next tutorial here which is going to learn about scheduling with your first client and how to handle one1 calls