New feature: WePay

SwimTopia is excited to announce support for WePay, a secure online payment processing service.

Why WePay?
A Better Experience

We’re excited because WePay helps us provide a better experience to our customers with a clean, simple, integrated checkout flow. No longer will customers need to visit an external website to complete payment. We know from analysis of our traffic and feedback from customers that with the external checkout process of our previous payment provider, some percentage of customers would leave to process payment and never return complete their registrations or orders. With their integrated checkout process, we look forward to dramatically reducing the number of abandoned checkouts.

Easier Setup

WePay also enables us to streamline account setup and configuration for our customers when they create a new account. Where we previously were forced to have our customers follow a series of step-by-step instructions on an often confusing and frequently changing external site to setup a payment processing account, WePay enables us to create and configure accounts on behalf of our customers right from within SwimTopia. And once your account is setup, you will find the interface to manage your account to be much easier and the reports available much more useful compared to previously supported payment solutions. Last but not least, they make it easy to automatically sweep funds from your WePay account to a linked checking account on a daily basis.

More Functionality

The addition of WePay support brings with it new features and makes them easier to use. They provide support for electronic check (ACH) payments, which incur much lower processing fees, and makes this lower-cost payment method easy to find and use during checkout.

More Flexibility

But perhaps what is most exciting about the addition of WePay support for SwimTopia is the flexibility it provides along with a modern well-documented application programming interface (API). In the coming months we will be expanding our support to take full advantage of the platform to support more complex payment scenarios including recurring monthly billing, payment plans, and collection of volunteer penalty fees and to add more convenience to SwimTopia with things like integrated refunds and account balance inquiries.

Transitioning away from PayPal

With the launch of our support for WePay we are simultaneously winding down our support for PayPal. Effective immediately WePay is the only payment processor supported for new accounts in SwimTopia. Existing customers with configured PayPal integrations will continue to be supported, but are encouraged to transition to a WePay account as soon as possible. In most cases the fees charged by WePay and PayPal are identical at 2.9% plus 30¢ per transaction. While WePay does not offer discounts for non-profit organizations at this time, the easier access it provides to lower-cost electronic check payments should help offset that difference for non-profit teams. And while PayPal accounts are uninsured and are largely exempt from banking regulations, WePay funds are held in a FDIC-insured bank account, which should help everyone sleep a little better at night.

We hope you are as excited as we are with the addition of WePay, a secure and easier-to-use payment solution. More information about setting up WePay on your team website can be found on the SwimTopia Support site. If you have any questions or comments about this new feature, we’d love to hear them. Please feel free to contact us at hello@swimtopia.com or (877) 856-2490.