How to Automate Vendor Payments in Woo with the Split Pay Plugin

Running a business can take extortionate amounts of time – often in the wrong areas. For instance, paying your vendors if you run a marketplace-style store is a definite time sink. However, once you learn how to automate vendor payments in Woo, that time can come back to you.

WordPress plugins are the best way to achieve this task, although there aren’t many that can blend the right features and functionality together. The Split Pay plugin will be ideal for lots of small business websites, and includes straightforward automation too.

In this post, join us as we look at how to automate vendor payments in Woo using Split Pay. It’s the primary focus of the post, but before that, let’s look at some of the context for our tutorial.

A Brief Look at the Split Pay Plugin (And Why Automating Your Vendor Payments Is Essential)

If the Split Pay plugin is new to you, you’re in luck. We produced an in-depth the Split Pay Plugin review elsewhere on the blog. In short, it lets you split out incoming payments from customers, and transfer percentages to vendors.

You’ll need to have a Stripe Connect account to achieve this, but that’s the only dependency. When it comes to apportioning payments, you have a variety of ways to do so. We’ll come to the details later, but you can split payments globally, for specific products, and variable items too. You also have the option to send fixed amounts or percentages.

This will offer plenty of benefits, such as optimizing your financial workflow. There are lots of use cases also, such as for non-profits that take donations. Split Pay is also perfect for multi-vendor marketplaces thanks to its straightforward set up and automated transfers.

This is the perfect time to go over how to automate your vendor payments in Woo with Split Pay. Let’s go through this next.

How to Automate Vendor Payments in Woo with the Split Pay Plugin

We cover some aspects of using Split Pay in our dedicated review. For instance, you’ll want to follow that to install the plugin along with the WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway plugin. That post will also help you register Split Pay and verify it using API keys from Stripe.

From there, you can begin to automate vendor payments in Woo. You’ll find the right options within the WooCommerce > Split Pay Plugin screen:

The good news is that the plugin will automate transfers without your input once you connect an account. To do this, add your site to the Connected Stripe Account ID field:

You’ll want to also set a Default Global Transfer type and value:

With this in place, you can begin to make automated transfers whenever you receive a payment. However, you will likely want to automate some granular transfers for specific products. This is possible through each product’s Edit screen, specifically within the product metaboxes at the bottom:

Once you click the Add New Account button, you will see similar fields to the default settings:

As before, you’ll need to set a Stripe Account ID – this time you can choose from the drop-down list. You’ll also have to select the transfer type for the product – either a fixed amount or a percentage – and a value:

After you save your changes, this will begin automating vendor payments for individual products. You can also do this for variable products too. Simply select the Variations tab and make sure the Product data drop-down menu shows Variable product:

The fields you need will be at the bottom of the tab – similar to the previous ones:

The Split Pay documentation outlines all of the use cases for transferring payments, so we recommend you have it open during your first few times using the plugin. After a while, this will become second nature.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

To round out this post, we have a few questions that will help to both summarize parts of the article, and explain parts we didn’t cover in depth. Remember, as always, if you have any other questions, slide into our comments section at the end of the post!

1. Can I Also Automate Refund Payments to Vendors?

Unfortunately, due to Stripe’s policies and functionality, there isn’t a way to process refunds in an automatic way. Our advice is to check out the Split Pay documentation for the full details of how to achieve refund payments to vendors – the process takes three steps and seconds to carry out.

2. What Types of Vendor Payments Can I Automate Within Split Pay?

Split Pay lets you automate all payments it processes. This includes global transfers, individual product-level transfers, and variable product transfers. There is a hierarchy here that the Split Pay documentation will outline for you. However, note that you can only split transfer credit card payments right now with the plugin.

3. Can I Automate Shipping Fees as Well as Vendor Payments?

You can transfer shipping fees too and automate them within the plugin’s settings. There’s a checkbox in the Additional Settings that lets you toggle shipping fee transfers. However, note that this only works for the first connected Stripe account. A future update of Spilt Pay will let you split shipping fees based on specific products too.

That’s a Wrap!

We’re confident that the Split Pay Plugin is almost the only solution to meet the needs of small businesses using Woo. One reason for this is its automation when it comes to outgoing payments. It’s simple to do and takes seconds to complete. The time you’ll take to learn how to automate vendor payments in Woo using Split Pay will benefit almost every other aspect of your business.

Do you think you have all the information you need to automate vendor payments in Woo using Split Pay? Ask us anything about it in the comments section below!