We’re happy to announce an important new integration available to our customers.

As you know, the ability to accept online payments for your classes, tours or personal appointments has always been a key strength of Bookeo. Bookeo also offers advanced features such as automatically charging any cancellation fees and the ability to securely store your customers’ credit card details so that you can charge the card later (ex. for outstanding balance), your customers can make new bookings faster, you can offer recurring memberships, and so on.

Over the time we’ve also added support for more and more payment gateways, both in North America and in other regions, and we will continue to do so.

One thing we’ve consistently noticed though is that many small businesses find it complex to set up a full merchant account to accept credit card payments. There are often different companies to talk to, many forms and questionnaires to fill in, and so on.

This is one reason why PayPal Payments standard is often very popular amongst our customers, because of its relative simplicity to set up.

However, the world of payment gateways is improving fast.

We’ve now added Stripe – a relatively young entrant to the market – as supported payment gateway, and we are very excited about it, because of the extreme simplicity by which it can be set up.

With Stripe it is literally possible to start accepting real online payments within minutes. Moreover it is not necessary to set up a merchant account: all you need is a normal bank account.

On the other hand, Stripe offers a full payment gateway functionality, so that for example your customers are not redirected to a different web site to pay – which can cause confusion and lost sales. Stripe also supports the ‘remember credit card’ functionality, so that all the advanced operations that are offered by Bookeo are possible as well.

Setup could not be simpler – you can in fact sign up for a Stripe account directly from within Bookeo!

There is really not much need for instructions, but just in case, here they are: https://support.bookeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018196551

Stripe is currently available in the US, Canada, UK and Ireland. However they’re already beta-testing support for other countries including Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain. Just ask them about entering their testing program.

So if you’re new to Bookeo, or if you’re considering starting taking online payments but were too scared by the possible complexity, give the new Stripe integration a go – you may be surprised!