Last night we released a major new feature to Tula. It’s called Payment Center, and I’d like to tell you a little about it, what it does, the philosophy behind the decisions we made, and why we think you’re going to love it. What is Payment Center?
At it’s core, payment center allows you to store your student’s credit card information, set up recurring memberships with automated billing, and also perform one time charges for individual class purchases.
Beyond this, you can now save purchases by transaction type, see payment history by student, view revenue reports across your entire system, and send automated receipts.
Payment Center is also the foundation upon which we will be building other key features as it relates to enabling our customers to collect money online.
How it works
To make this happen, we have deeply integrated with one of the most innovative payment providers around, called Stripe. Stripe has no setup fees, no monthly fees, and clear per transaction pricing (2.9% + $0.30). Even better, they have a sign up process that can be completed in 3 minutes.
With the launch of Payment Center, our customers can literally be set up to take credit cards in less than 5 minutes.
The philosophy behind Payment Center
Nothing defines our philosophy more than the decisions we made around Payment Center. We are aiming to be nothing other than the absolute best software in the world for independent yoga studios.
We are not, however, aiming to be the best credit card processing software in the world. And so we deeply integrated with people who are.
We have built a state of the art payment system that gives our customers the ability start taking credit cards in minutes, is PCI level 1 compliant, and puts student credit card information in the hands of our customers.
Once you have connected your Stripe account with your Tula account, everything is managed from within Tula. Stripe is used to store credit cards, (we store tokens related to those credit cards, allowing us to maintain PCI compliance), charge those credit cards, and deposit money into your bank account. Everything else, such as setting up recurring membership plans, charging your students, giving refunds, and sending receipts, is all handled through Tula.
What’s Next?
Now that we have a solid payment foundation, you can expect to see more features along this line. Without spilling all the beans, let’s just say that we definitely plan on enabling our customers to easily accept payments via their own websites. Wait, that’s probably all the beans, isn’t it?
We’re thrilled to launch Payment Center, and we’re excited about the things we’ll be able to build upon it’s foundation. We hope you like it as much as we do.
Video Tutorials
To help guide people as they set up their accounts, we put together a few video tutorials which we’ve embedded in the application itself. Check them out below.
What is an API
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FSNvhE8EMY&w=560&h=315]
How to connect your Stripe account using your API keys
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3lUT0FQLsY&w=560&h=315]