- No monthly fee, no startup fee
- A standard 2.9% + $.30 per transaction fee, collected in the standard currency of the account (CAD or USD)
- Payments are transferred directly to your bank account within 48 hours.
- When members pay they don’t leave your site. For example, PayPal Standard forces a member to PayPal.com to finish a transaction.
- Recurring payments (aka scheduled payments) are supported.
- There are a variety of financial reports that are available.
- Wild Apricot provides integrated one-stop support for the product and the payment gateway.
- Currently, only US and Canada residents can apply for a Wild Apricot Payments account in USD or CAD currencies.
- For US and Canadian-based Wild Apricot customers, there is no payment system servicing fee.
As of October 1, 2018 only 4 payment gateways will remain — Wild Apricot Payments, various PayPal flavours, Stripe and Authorize.net. Our informed opinion is simple:
Wild Apricot customers should all consider moving to Wild Apricot Payments, the preferred payment gateway, as soon as possible.
We forecast that support for all other payment gateways will be discouraged and eventually Wild Apricot Payment gateway will be the only supported online payment mechanism.
UPDATE 1: As of April 2, 2019 a “payment system servicing fee” will apply to all Wild Apricot accounts that are not using Wild Apricot Payments. So if you are renewing your annual plan in early 2019 and you are a US or Canada-based Wild Apricot customer, it is highly recommended to switch to Wild Apricot Payments as soon as possible to avoid this service fee.
UPDATE 2: As of February 1, 2021 PayPal Checkout will be the only supported PayPal payment gateway on Wild Apricot. Accounts that haven’t made the switch to PayPal Checkout by February 1, 2021 will be automatically switched to accepting manual payments until they have switched to PayPal Checkout.
UPDATE 3: Wild Apricot Customers using Stripe need to switch their Wild Apricot payment system to Stripe Connect by February 1, 2021. As of that date, Wild Apricot will stop supporting the legacy Stripe payment system.
Many Software as a Service products that offer financial support (eg online invoicing systems) are amalgamating support around 1 payment gateway due to the nature of the evolving markets and availability of specialized gateways like Affinipay. Wild Apricot has created not only a technical relationship with Affinipay, but a financial one as well. Affinipay incents Wild Apricot financially to use them as a gateway, and that helps Wild Apricot to continue to keep software subscription costs down. When using any other payment gateway, Wild Apricot does not get any financial incentives. With Affinipay, this changes forever as Wild Apricot receives a commission based on the volume of transactions that flow from Wild Apricot to Affinipay. In effect the more online transactions you pass through Wild Apricot Payments on your Wild Apricot website, the more money flows to Wild Apricot effectively subsidizing your monthly Wild Apricot fee — without costing you, the customer, one extra cent!
As a Wild Apricot customer, this only benefits you because not only can Wild Apricot focus on supporting just 1 payment gateway, but they can use the added revenue to create new features and benefits while working to keep the price of Wild Apricot low. This is smart business strategy, but it does create some uncertainty for current customers. We hope you will reach out to NewPath Consulting to assuage those fears and prepare to migrate your payment gateway when you are ready.
The Good
- USD and CAD accounts can be setup in 2-3 days using a simple onboarding form.
- Affinipay has an easy to use and secure dashboard
- You can send requests for payment (called Quick Bill) by email, and your customers can pay right from the email. This is an alternative of paying for an invoice directly from Wild Apricot.
- You can also charge credit cards on the fly using the virtual terminal feature
- You can make same day voids and refunds up to 6 months after the transaction
- Deposits happen daily – available in your bank account within 1-2 business days. All revenue is deposited in your bank account, and any transaction fees are subsequently withdrawn, so you can audit the full revenue received less the transaction fees.
- You can make same-day refunds at zero cost to you. All fees are refunded for a same-day refund.
Not so good
- For now the payment information collection is still done on a separate Wild Apricot payments page (payments.wildapricot.com). This is not ideal because setting up conversion and goal tracking is hard to do on a page you do not control. We are told this is required for PCI DSS compliance.
- There is currently no support for Interac transfers or debit cards in Canada.
- There is no support for many currencies such as the Euro. Currently only USD and CAD are supported. Organizations that require other currencies located outside of the US or Canada should use PayPal or Stripe, and will not be subject to the Payment Gateway Servicing Fee.
