Thinkific Payments: Managing Student Payments

With TCommerce, powered by Thinkific Payments, you can view and manage student payments directly from your Thinkific Admin Dashboard.

About This Feature

We know that generating sales is a crucial aspect of growing your business. We also know that time spent on payments is time not spent teaching. That’s why we’ve launched TCommerce, powered by Thinkific Payments - to help you sell more products and spend less time doing it!

As part of TCommerce, our built-in checkout is regularly tested and optimized to help maximize conversions. As well, order tracking, refunds, and payouts are now built right into Thinkific.

How It Works

TCommerce, our suite of business tools powered by Thinkific Payments, allows you to accept payment from students through Thinkific's Built in Checkout without having to connect with a third-party payment provider. In the past, our built-in checkout required you to connect with Stripe or Paypal to process payments. Now with TCommerce, all you need is a Thinkific account and a bank account to start selling your products.

Once you've set up your Thinkific Payments account and set your product pricing, you can start managing new student payments directly from your Thinkific Admin Dashboard.

Important Considerations

Paypal can be connected with Thinkific Payments to offer students additional payment options.
Only the Site Owner can set up or make changes to a Thinkific site's Thinkific Payments account.
If you previously used Stripe or PayPal to process payments on Thinkific, you can log into your Stripe or PayPal account for records of any student payments that were processed before signing up for Thinkific Payments.

Managing Student Payments

Recurring student payments for subscriptions and payment plans can be viewed in the Orders Report Transactions Report, and Users tabs of your Admin Dashboard.

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

From your Admin Dashboard, select Users
Select All Users
In the Users table click on a student's Full Name to view their profile
Select the Payments tab

The Payments tab will only appear in a user's profile if they have purchased a subscription or payment plan using Thinkific Payments.

The Payments Table

Once you navigate to the Payments tab in your student's profile, you will see all of their subscription and payment plans that were purchased through Thinkific Payments:

Users Payment Table 2024.png

This table shows:

Product - The title of the course, community, or bundle
Status - The payment status of the subscription or payment plan (see below for more information)
Price - The price of the subscription or payment plan. If you have set up a custom first payment for subscription pricing, this value will also appear in the Price column
Last payment - The date and time (in your timezone) of the most recent payment for a subscription or payment plan
Created - The date and time (in your timezone) the subscription or payment plan was purchased
Paused on - The date and time (in your timezone) a subscription or payment plan was paused

Subscriptions and payment plans can have the following statuses:

Active - Recurring payments are ongoing, the student is up-to-date on payments and has access to the product
Canceled - Recurring payments have been canceled, and the student does not have access to the product. This status is displayed when either the student or creator cancels the recurring payments (see below for more information)
Past due - A payment for a subscription or payment plan failed. The student does not have access to the product (see below for more information)
Closed - This status is for payment plans only and is displayed when all payments have been made. The student will have access to the product until the enrollment expiry date

Managing Multiple Student Payments from the Orders Table

To review multiple students' orders check out the Orders table in the Orders Report. This table displays all of your students' orders made through Thinkific's Built in Checkout - including orders processed through Thinkific Payments.

Once you've set up Thinkific Payments for your Thinkific site, this table will also include orders for free products.

Fees and Providers in the Orders Table

The Orders table will also include a Fees column that shows the total fees for each order. This is a total amount that may include several different fees and may be different depending on which payment processor handled that particular transaction.

For more information about fees charged by Thinkific Payments, see our article What fees do I pay with Thinkific? If you're not sure which orders were processed through Thinkific Payments, see our article: Did my student's purchase go through Thinkific Payments, Stripe, or PayPal?

The Fees and Providers columns will also be included when you Export the Transaction Reports.

More Actions for Student Payments

From the Payments tab of your Users section, you can take a variety of additional actions to assist your students, including:

Frequently Asked Questions

If I downgrade to the Free plan, what will happen to the existing subscriptions/payment plans my students have?

When you downgrade to the Free plan, your TCommerce subscription cancel/pause functionality will remain unchanged (meaning you will still have access to it). Existing subscriptions and payment plans processed via TPayments will continue to run, even after you have downgraded to Free.

Creators who have downgraded to Free will lose access to subscription pricing going forward. This means you will no longer be able to sell new recurring payment products.