Commerce GoCardless Client

The module integrates Drupal Commerce with the GoCardless international payment service.

The big advantage with GoCardless is that it is generally cheaper than credit/debit card payment services. Fees in the UK are 1% + 20p, compared with Paypal for example which is 3.4% + a flat fee.

GoCardless is an expanding international payment system, and is currently available in 8 currencies and 30+ countries. Currencies supported are GBP, EUR, USD, SEK, AUD, NZD, DKK and CAD. According to GoCardless their international payment system is 75% cheaper than Paypal, and is also considerable cheaper than Stripe. The module allows you to collect payments in the full range of GoCardless currencies even if your store only uses a single currency.

Commerce GoCardless Client enables customers to checkout and make Instant payments using open banking protocol, and/or create debit mandates for generating recurring payments.

Each product variation in your store is individually configured to use either Instant payments, or one of the two recurring payment types: "One-off" payments, or Subscription payments.

Instant payments are single payments created upon checkout by GoCardless using open banking protocol and do not require a debit mandate. Open banking does not use credit/debit cards but the experience is similar to credit card services in that the customer is required to provide their bank details, and to verify the bank account.

The advantage of Instant payments is that they are created immediately, whereas debit payments take several days to complete, following an instruction from GoCardless to the bank to create a new mandate, and authorise the payment. Instant Payments is a relatively new feature from GoCardless, and is currently only available to customers with British or German bank accounts.

Subscription and One-off payments both require a debit mandate, which is created by GoCardless upon checkout:

• Subscriptions are recurring payments that are created automatically by GoCardless according to the rules that you set for the product. Subscriptions work well for users that want to take the same payment on a regular basis (for instance £5 per week, or £20 on the first of each month, etc).
• One-off payments are created when your website instructs GoCardless to do so, and are more flexible than Subscription payments. This allows you to charge your end customers ad-hoc amounts. The module allows One-off payment products to be configured so that your website will automatically generate payments for them according to a schedule.

Module features:

• Instant Payment checkouts using open banking protocol
• Subscriptions for automatic recurring payments
• One-off payments for client-side ad-hoc and scheduled payment creations
• Fully configurable pre-defined recurrence rules on a per product variation basis
• The option for Recurring Orders, which are useful when a separate order number and order confirmation / invoice are required for each recurring payment
• A configurable field to allow customers to choose their own recurrence preferences
• Client-side scheduling for recurring One-off payments
• No libraries - easy installation
• Available in an expanding range of currencies and countries - even if your store only uses one currency
• Tools for managing subscriptions and one-off payments within existing orders / mandates
• A range of hooks to allow other modules to alter or react to events, such as mandate or payment creation
• GoCardless webhooks providing complete integration with site and customer mandates
• A pre-defined price field and rules for out of the box Flat Rate shipping solution

The module is provided by Seamless-CMS which is a partner of GoCardless. Sites that implement the module are 'clients' of Seamless, which works in conjunction with the client site to generate GoCardless payments, subscriptions, and debit mandates. As a partner of GoCardless, Seamless-CMS receives a percentage of any revenue collected from payments. This arrangement does not cost client sites, or end customers any extra, and it is intended that the income derived from this will make the development and maintenance of the module sustainable.

Instant Payment features
These are only available in the 2.x branch and from 2.0.4 onwards.

Recurring Orders
These are only available in the 2.x branch and from 2.0.6 onwards. Recurring orders are created automatically as children of the parent order when a recurring payment is created. They are useful for sites where a separate order number and order confirmation / invoice are required for each recurring payment. More info on Recurring Orders is available in the README.md file.

For Drupal 9 and 10, user version 2.1.2.