By migrating your payment processor to Thinkific Payments, you'll immediately get access to our full suite of proven selling tools available exclusively on TCommerce. This step-by-step guide will walk you through how to migrate from third-party payment processors (like Stripe or PayPal). Our customers on TCommerce sell more, earn more, and have larger transactions. Get in on the customer success we're seeing and migrate today!
In this article:
What Happens When I Migrate to Thinkific Payments?
How to Migrate to Thinkific Payments from Stripe
Step 1: Enable Thinkific Payments
Step 2: Confirm Your Product Tax Category
Step 3: Explore TCommerce Selling Tools
Step 4: Confirm the Successful Recurring Student Payment Migration
Manage Migrated Student Payments in Your Thinkific Admin Dashboard
Refund Past Payments in Stripe
About This Feature
Thinkific customers on TCommerce sell more. We built TCommerce specifically for creators and education businesses, to help you sell more, and spend less time doing it. We’ve seen the data: Thinkific customers on TCommerce sell more, earn more, see higher conversion rates and have larger transactions overall.
Migrating to Thinkific Payments from Stripe is simple, only takes about 10 minutes, and allows you to get access to the TCommerce suite of tools, giving you the best way to grow your business!
Here is how Thinkific Payments and TCommerce can help you:
- Customers on Thinkific Payments have seen up to 22% larger average transaction sizes.
- Gifting can boost transaction sizes by up to 6.2%.
- Customers who offer Buy Now, Pay Later payment methods (e.g. Affirm, Klarna, AfterPay) see higher transaction sizes and earn 7.5% more revenue on average.
- Orders with an Order Bump have a 20% larger average transaction size.
- Smart Retries help TCommerce customers to earn up to 30% more revenue.
What Happens When I Migrate to Thinkific Payments?
When migrating to Thinkific Payments from Stripe, you will get access to the TCommerce suite of tools to help you grow your business. At the same time, you will need to rebuild or adjust certain integrations and functionality.
What Will Migrate
Your students' pre-existing subscriptions, payment plans, and billing cycles will automatically migrate to Thinkific Payments. All new transactions processed after the migration will be done through Thinkific Payments. This migration will occur 30–60 days after setting up your Thinkific Payments account.
Subscription and payment plans migrated to TCommerce will have the same:
- billing date
- end date
- coupons and coupon end date (if applicable)
Your product settings and pricing configuration will stay the same - you will not need to edit or update your existing product pricing or checkout links.
What Will Not Migrate
Some specific features, settings, and integrations are currently only available on Stripe, including:
Integrations that are currently set up with Stripe today would not carry over to Thinkific Payments. However, there are some workarounds you can implement. See the table below for the most common impacted integrations:
| Integration | Solution |
| ActiveCampaign integrated with Stripe | Explore Thinkific and ActiveCampaign integration |
| Any Zapier Zap’s set up with Stripe | Rebuild zaps using Thinkific and Zapier integration |
| Stunning integrated with Stripe | N/A We are working on bringing this solution in the future, reach out to us to submit your feedback! |
| Payments API | Use Thinkific Payments webhooks. |
The following settings and subscription management options can now be done by reaching out to our Support team by following these instructions or by emailing us at payments-support@thinkific.com:
- Option to change the payout schedule
- Option to alter your statement descriptor
- Certain student subscription options, including:
- Adjusting student’s billing cycle
- Editing the timeline of the subscription or payment plan
- Adding a coupon post-purchase
- Increasing the price post-purchase
- Upgrading or downgrading student’s membership tier
New Features You Gain
Once Thinkific Payments is enabled, you will get access to the TCommerce suite of tools to help you grow your business. This includes:
- Thinkific Payments allows you to manage payments, refunds and subscriptions all in one place — no third-party processors.
- Order Bumps increase your average order value by seamlessly offering complementary products in your checkout
- Gifting allows you to sell your learning products as gifts that your audience can give to friends and family, helping you boost your sales with a new audience
- Group Orders allow you to sell your learning products in bulk at checkout, helping you increase the value of every order
- Smart Retries increase conversions by retrying failed subscription or payment plans using machine learning and data points
- Buy Now, Pay Later payment methods like Affirm, AfterPay and Klarna, helping you increase conversions and average order value.
- Sales Tax and VAT Solution As part of our commitment to compliance–and making your life easier, Thinkific automates tax management for your US, Canadian, UK, and EU sales (where tax is applicable)
- And more! Learn about the features here: TCommerce: Powered by Thinkific Payments
How to Migrate to Thinkific Payments from Stripe
Do NOT disconnect your existing Stripe account from Thinkific until your payment data has migrated successfully (Step 4 below). The migration process will take 30-60 days to complete. It may be tempting to disconnect Stripe immediately upon moving to Thinkific Payments but the migration requires that Stripe still be connected. If you disconnect your Stripe account prior to the migration, the migration will fail.
Step 1: Enable Thinkific Payments
The process of enabling Thinkific Payments on average takes about 10 minutes, followed by a period of 24-48 hours of verification. To ensure that the process is smooth, before you begin setting up Thinkific Payments, make sure that you have your:
- Business address
- SSN (Social Security Number), if located in the US
- EIN (Employer Identification Number) or TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number)
- Bank account details (void check/direct deposit information)
Once you have that information ready, head over to your Thinkific Admin Dashboard to set up your account and follow the instructions in the video below and here: Thinkific Payments.
Step 2: Confirm Your Product Tax Category
The Sales Tax and VAT solutions are available to all TCommerce accounts. To ensure that the correct tax is being collected on your sales, you should review and update your product tax categories. Tax categories are used during checkout to determine whether tax is applicable in the jurisdiction where a student is located and if so, what tax should be collected. Selecting the right category is crucial in determining what sales tax percentage should be collected, if at all. To learn more about the Sales Tax Solution and how to edit product tax categories, see: TCommerce: Sales Tax and VAT Solution.
Step 3: Explore TCommerce Selling Tools
Enabling Thinkific Payments gives you access to a suite of TCommerce tools to help you grow your business. Whether it is boosting transaction sizes using Gifting or Order Bumps or earning more revenue using Smart Retries and Buy Now Pay Later options, TCommerce offers tools to help you sell more and spend less time doing this!
The following features are enabled automatically on all qualifying TCommerce accounts (depending on your Thinkific plan):
- Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), Digital Wallets, and Bank Redirects
- Gifting
- Group Orders
- Incomplete Purchase Reminder
- Customer Testimonials at the TCommerce Checkout
- And more! Learn more here: TCommerce: Powered by Thinkific Payments
The following features need to be enabled manually:
- If you have more than one product, get started by creating an Order Bump to take advantage of your students’ existing motivation and momentum and increase your transaction size!
- Recover lost sales and increase conversions with abandoned cart emails, exclusively on TCommerce! Easily re-engage potential students who leave the checkout process without completing their purchase.
Step 4: Confirm the Successful Recurring Student Payment Migration
Do NOT disconnect your existing Stripe account from Thinkific until your payment data has migrated successfully. The migration process will take 30-60 days to complete. It may be tempting to disconnect Stripe immediately upon moving to Thinkific Payments but the migration requires that Stripe still be connected. If you disconnect your Stripe account prior to the migration, the migration will fail.
If you had previously connected with Stripe to process recurring payments, any pre-existing student subscriptions, payment plans, and billing cycles will automatically migrate to Thinkific Payments. This migration will occur 30–60 days after setting up your Thinkific Payments account. Prior to migration, you will receive a notification email detailing an overview with an option to opt out.
Migrating payments means that you can easily manage all student payments from your Thinkific dashboard!
Once this migration is underway, check out the Managing Payments section below for information on how to access and manage migrated student payments.
Considerations Prior to Recurring Payments Migration
- Your Thinkific Payments account status must be Verifiedfor student payments to migrate to Thinkific Payments.
- A student's subscription and/or payment plan must have one of the following statuses in Stripe in order to be migrated to Thinkific Payments: active (and not paused), past due, or trialing.
- Subscriptions or payment plans that have a canceled status in Stripe will not be migrated to Thinkific Payments.
- If a subscription or payment plan was not previously migrated for one of the reasons listed above, and the criteria for migration are now fulfilled (e.g. a subscription is now un-paused), the subscription or payment plan will be migrated 30–60 days after the criteria has been met.
- Recurring payments not migrated to Thinkific Payments from Stripe, and records of past payments processed through Stripe, can be viewed and managed from your Stripe dashboard.
Student subscriptions and payment plans can not be bulk re-imported into Stripe once they have been migrated to Thinkific Payments. Please contact us if you would like to learn more.
Considerations After Successful Recurring Payment Migrating
- The original recurring payment plan processed with Stripe will be canceled, so your students aren't getting charged twice
- The same billing period & date will still apply. Meaning if your student was charged monthly on the 20th, they'll still be charged monthly on the 20th in Thinkific Payments. This means there will be no change to your cash flow! On the flip side, this means that the same end date will apply to any recurring payments migrated.
- Migrated recurring payment plans can be found through your User table by selecting the student's name and selecting the Payments tab.
- When the next payment is collected, you'll still see this as an order in the Orders table in Thinkific. You'll see within the table that the payment was processed through Thinkific Payments and not Stripe.
- You'll then be able to refund and cancel subscriptions from within Thinkific and manually retry any failed payments!
Manage Migrated Student Payments in Your Thinkific Admin Dashboard
After subscriptions and payment plans have been migrated to Thinkific Payments, no future payments for these subscriptions and payment plans will be processed through Stripe. Migrated student payments can now be viewed and managed in your Thinkific Admin Dashboard.
View Student Payments
To review an individual student's payments for subscriptions and payment plans, follow the instructions here: Thinkific Payments: Managing Student Payments.
After a subscription or payment plan has appeared in a student's Payments table, you have the option to:
- cancel subscriptions and payment plans
- pause or resume subscriptions and payment plans
- and manually retry failed payments
If a subscription or payment plan has migrated with a Past duestatus, Thinkific Payments will begin attempts to collect the outstanding student payment. Read more about this payment retry process.
View Payment Details
Subscription and payment plans migrated to TCommerce will have the same:
- billing date
- end date
- coupons and coupon end date (if applicable)
In a student's Payments table, the Created& date will reflect the date the subscription or payment plan migrated to Thinkific Payments, not the initial purchase date from Stripe.
Manage Student Payments
After a subscription or payment plan has migrated to Thinkific Payments, the next payment due for the subscription or payment plan will be processed through Thinkific Payments. The payment schedule (billing cycle) for migrated subscriptions and payment plans will be the same as it previously was in Stripe.
These payments will then appear in Transaction Reports in the Transactions page and in the Orders table of your Orders Report as processed by Thinkific Payments:
Information about an individual student's payments is also available from the Payments tab in their user profile.
For any payments processed through Thinkific Payments, you can refund students directly from the Transactions page. For more information about refunding student payments using Thinkific Payments, refer to our article: Thinkific Payments: Refunds.
If you would like to pause student payments, change a student's billing date, edit statement descriptions - or issue pricing changes, coupons, or credits for existing student subscriptions or payment plans - please email payments-support@thinkific.com for assistance.
Refund Past Payments in Stripe
If you need to refund a subscription or payment plan payment processed through Stripe before payments are migrated to Thinkific Payments, you can do so from your Stripe account dashboard.
If a payment was processed through Stripe, you won't see the option to Refund the transaction from the Transactions page. Instead, refer to our article: How to Process a Refund in Stripe.
If a payment was processed through Thinkific Payments, you will see the option to Refund the transactions from the Transactions page. For more information about refunding student payments using Thinkific Payments, refer to our article: Thinkific Payments: Refunds.
For more information about payment processor information in the Orders table, check out our article: Did my student's purchase go through Thinkific Payments, Stripe, or PayPal?
Student Experience
From a student perspective, this migration will ensure a seamless learning experience. Students are not required to re-purchase subscriptions and/or payment plans, and their product access will not be interrupted.
Sales Tax or VAT will not apply or be calculated to migrated subscriptions unless a student re-purchases the subscription (e.g. they cancel and buy the subscription again) or purchases a new product, at which point the tax will be calculated and determined as outlined here: TCommerce: Sales Tax and VAT Solution.
Your students might see new checkout options when purchasing new products (e.g. options to gift, complete a bulk order, or purchase using additional options).
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I get help with Thinkific Payments or how can I learn more about Thinkific Payments?
Please reach out to us by following these instructions or by emailing us at payments-support@thinkific.com and we will be happy to help!
How much does Thinkific Payments cost to use?
Thinkific Payments costs the same as Stripe to use. For a breakdown of fees, check out our article: Thinkific Payments Supported Countries and Transaction Fees.
Can I switch back to Stripe if I don't like Thinkific Payments?
Absolutely! We would love to learn more about how we can improve Thinkific Payments and TCommerce and help you choose the best payment processor for your business. Please email payments-support@thinkific.com for assistance.
Why does it take 30–60 days to migrate my students' payments?
Student migrations are delayed by 30–60 days so that you can ensure Thinkific Payments is the right fit for you and your business.
Check out our article, How does the timing of student payment migrations from Stripe to Thinkific Payments work?, for more information about this 30-to-60-day delay, and example payment scenarios.
When refunding a student, do I receive a refund for processing or transaction fees?
There are no fees to refund a charge, but the fees from the original charge are not returned. This is true for full and partial refunds.
I signed up for Stripe and/or PayPal originally, what happens when I sign up for Thinkific Payments?
When you sign up for Thinkific Payments, all recurring payments going forward will be processed through Thinkific Payments. If you previously integrated with Stripe, you can log into your Stripe account for records of any recurring payments that were processed before signing up for Thinkific Payments.
If you have integrated with PayPal, students will still see the option to pay with PayPal at checkout for courses and bundles with one-time payment pricing. You can log into your PayPal account for records of these and past transactions processed through PayPal.
For more information, check out our article: Did my student's purchase go through Thinkific Payments, Stripe, or PayPal?
Do I need to disconnect Stripe before setting up Thinkific Payments?
No, please do not disconnect Stripe before setting up Thinkific Payments. For more information please see our article: Do I need to disconnect Stripe before setting up Thinkific Payments?
Can I connect with PayPal and Thinkific Payments to offer my students two payment processing options?
Yes! For more information please see our article: If I connect with Thinkific Payments, can I use Stripe and PayPal to accept student payments too?