Migrating Subscriptions and Payment Plans from Stripe to Thinkific Payments

Migrating student subscriptions and payment plans to TCommerce, powered by Thinkific Payments, from Stripe ensures your existing students have a seamless payment experience. The migration process automatically begins when you sign up for Thinkific Payments!

How to Migrate Recurring Student Payments to Thinkific Payments

When you sign up for TCommerce, powered by Thinkific Payments, all student subscription and payment plan purchases going forward will be processed through Thinkific Payments.

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!

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.

Once this migration is underway, check out Managing Payments (below) for how to access and manage migrated student payments.

Important Considerations

Warning: do not disconnect your existing Stripe account from Thinkific until your payment data has migrated successfully, after the 30-60 day waiting period. 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.

Your Thinkific Payments account status must be Verified for 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 is 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.

Students' subscriptions and payment plans can not be bulk re-imported into Stripe once they have been migrated to Thinkific Payments.

Managing 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.

Viewing Student Payments

To review an individual student's payments for subscriptions and payment plans:

In the navigation menu on the left-hand side of your Admin Dashboard, click Support Your Students
Select Users
In the Users table, click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab at the top

After a subscription or payment plan has appeared in a student's Payments table, you have the option to:

If a subscription or payment plan has migrated with a Past due status, Thinkific Payments will begin attempts to collect the outstanding student payment. Read more about this payment retry process.

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.

Managing 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.

Refunding Past Payments in Stripe

If you need to refund a subscription or payment plan payment processed through Stripe before payments 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?

Frequently Asked Questions

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: What fees do I pay with Thinkific Payments?

If you're looking for more information about fees, please email payments-support@thinkific.com.

Can I switch back to Stripe if I don't like Thinkific Payments?

Absolutely. 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, you don't need to 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?