How To Generate Stripe Payment Links To Quickly Get Paid Online (Step-By-Step Guide)

Getting signed up for Stripe is easy, however, using Stripe to collect payments can be very confusing and frustrating at first. Can you relate? I know when I first started with Stripe, I assumed they would make it very simple to embed a form or create a payment link. That just isn’t the case though. And here’s why...

Stripe focuses on serving the largest segment of the credit card processing market - developers. They have done an incredible job building out a rich set of tools to help support almost every use case there is. Most of their technology involves working with a coding language of your choice along with their robust API.

While this is flexible and fantastic for developer experience, where does this leave a Stripe beginner who just wants to send out a payment link? That’s exactly what we’re going to cover in today’s post. I’m going to walk you through (step-by-step) how to use our Stripe payment link generator to create a payment link to start selling your products and services in minutes.

What is a Stripe payment link?

A payment link is the easiest way to get paid online without making updates or changes to your website. Many of us don’t want the hassle that comes along with coding a custom payment form, a server to authenticate our requests, and all of the other considerations that come with it.

In short, a payment link allows you to create a secure Stripe checkout page that you can then share with your customers via email, SMS text messages, and social media. They provide a simple and flexible way to collect payments without a ton of work.

Why we need payment links:

• No coding or paying a developer for updates
• Save time by never updating our website for pricing changes
• Automatically handle failed and successful charges
• Sync data to your Stripe account
• Make it as easy as possible to share with your clients/customers
• Easy to edit, change, update pricing and plans
• Faster than sending to a landing page checkout

Can I make a payment link with Stripe checkout?

If you’ve been following Stripe recently, you might have heard about their new product Stripe Checkout. Checkout offers the ability to use a Stripe hosted payment page that you can link to from your website.

The only problem?

You can’t actually create a payment link with Stripe Checkout. You can only link to the Stripe-hosted page from your website with SSL encryption, so this limits the ability to share via any other medium. And even worse, it requires you to manually embed code snippets for every product.

While being a great step in the right direction, this again is an example of Stripe being a developer-focused company that creates solutions for tech-minded folks, versus creating consumer-focused technology.

So how do you actually make a payment link then? Let’s continue...

How to generate a payment link for Stripe

While you cannot use Stripe itself to generate a payment link there are other options available. Payment link providers like SecuraCart aim to make this process as friendly as possible.

SecuraCart makes it easy for your business to create beautiful, high-converting payment forms that can be embedded into your website as a form or a button or shared as a payment link.

Creating an account is FREE and we only charge 1% per successful transaction at this time.

How SecuraCart payment links work

1.) Create a product

To create a new recurring or one-time product, simply fill out the short form where you can decide on your pricing options, your product or service title, and description, add product photos and videos, digital asset delivery, and more.

2.) Decide how to share it

After your product is published, navigate to the Share options available. From here, you can choose between embed, modal, and link share.

3.) Copy the payment link

Copy the link to your product and you’re ready to promote wherever your audience is. Send your customers the link and we take care of the rest. They’ll automatically receive a receipt, and your Stripe account will populate with their purchases along with your product for data tracking.

4.) Done!

Do you see how powerful that is? In less than 2 minutes, we created a beautiful checkout page to represent our product that we can now share whenever we want to get paid! In the next section, we’re going to cover the easiest (and most effective) ways to share and use your payment link to generate sales and revenue for your business.

Best way to share Stripe payment links

Now that you have your payment link created, you’re ready to share it and get paid. What makes a payment link so useful is that you can use them in so many different ways. You can text or email them. You can post them on LinkedIn or Reddit in a comment thread. You can promote them in your email newsletter. Here are some of the most popular ways to share payment links - feel free to steal these and use them yourself.

Sharing your payment links

• If your business prefers to make sales over the phone, try keeping your potential customer on the phone while you email or text message them the link to your payment page. This will allow you to walk them through any last-minute questions, while also ensuring that they pay sooner than later.
• In your next blog post, include a call-to-action that uses your payment link to instantly focus the reader on your offer.
• In your next email newsletter or automated marketing campaign, add your payment link into the email with a firm call-to-action. You would be surprised how effective this can be when your audience is engaged and ready to purchase.
• Create a discount promotion pricing link and share it with your audience on social media. This will allow you to easily modify the pricing and share discounts to get your readers excited. When you’re ready to close down the deal, just delete your link.
• Run a text message promoting your product that includes your payment link. This has the added benefit of higher conversions if your customer/lead has enabled Apply Pay or Google Pay with one-click checkout. Definitely the easiest way for your customer to pay you!

Benefits of using payment links

I hope by now we can both agree that payment links are a great utility to have available in our businesses. They are by far the simplest way to start collecting payments online, even if you don’t own or want a website. This flexibility comes with some major benefits when compared to traditional pricing pages, or inline (embedded on your site) forms.

Related Reading: How To Acccept Payments Without A Website

The best reasons to use payment links

• We can empower our marketing and sales teams to easily create new deals or special offers without needing a developer to update the website
• We can make it as easy as possible for our customers to pay us without entering a credit card number by sending the link to a one-click payment-enabled (Apple Pay) phone.
• Fully utilize all of the benefits of Stripe’s API without having to code or have any real tech skills.

Conclusion

While it’s true that Stripe payment links make it easy for our customers to pay us, the main reason to use one is the ease that it offers us to flexibly manage our pricing and services without paying any money or making updates to our website.

The effort and expenses spent over time when you are constantly managing a website, along with a pricing page, along with a checkout page can be a massive waste of resources in your business.

A better solution, especially when getting started, is to avoid these expenses altogether. Instead, we can use these resources to work on promoting our brands, talking to our customers, and performing meaningful work in our business that will lead to concrete ROI.

What’s your favorite way to promote your payment links online?