How to Enable BECS With Stripe and MemberPress?

Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) Direct Debit is a bank debit payment method available in Australia. This payment method allows direct payments between Australia-based bank accounts.

MemberPress integration with Stripe allows you to receive payments through BECS. This document will show you how to set this up and provide more details on BECS Direct Debit. 

Receiving Payments With BECS

BECS is supported only through the built-in MemberPress integration with Stripe. Thus, before enabling BECS, please connect Stripe to MemberPress on your site, and test the connection to make sure it’s functioning well.

After your Stripe connection is properly set, please enable BECS as the payment method in your Stripe account, and then in MemberPress. You will find the BECS option in your Stripe account by navigating to Settings > Payment Methods and scrolling down to the “Bank debits” section.

Please check more details on setting this up in the “How To Enable Payment Methods With Stripe and Memberpress” document.

Also, to enable BECS Direct Debit in your Stripe account, you will need to complete additional identity verification steps required by Stripe.

Once BECS is enabled, your membership registration forms will show this new payment option. The BECS payment option will be available on both Stripe Checkout and Stripe Element forms. 

On the registration form, customers will be asked to provide their account number, name, and email. Further, by submitting their payment data they will be authorizing you to collect a mandate (Direct Debit Request) which authorizes your company to debit their account. 

What’s Important to Know About Using BECS?

BECS Direct Debit can be used as a payment method for both recurring and non-recurring payments. Also, BECS supports memberships with free or paid trials.

On the other hand, the BECS payment option will show only if all conditions are met, as BECS integration comes with several limitations imposed by BECS or Stripe. 

Further, BECS is only available to your users with Australian bank accounts, and it only supports payments in Australian Dollars. Accordingly, to use BECS with MemberPress, please make sure that the currency in MemberPress settings is set to AUD. 

In addition, both the country selected for your Stripe account and the country set in your MemberPress settings must be Australia.

Finally, please keep in mind that BECS is a delayed notification payment method. This means that it will take up to 3 business days to process the payment and send the notification of success or failure to MemberPress. By default, MemberPress creates subscriptions on your site with a 1-day grace period to compensate for the payment processing time. In this case, you would need to extend the default grace period to 5 days (to accommodate three business days for processing and two possible weekend days), as otherwise, your users might be without access to your protected content.

You can find more information about BECS Direct Debit payments in Stripe documentation.