Adding a New Payment Gateway Option to Paid Memberships Pro [FAQ]

Sometimes your region or business needs may require a payment gateway that is not already integrated with Paid Memberships Pro. If you are in this position, this guide aims to explain what you can do to still use PMPro for your membership site with the gateway option of your choice.

While our documentation page outlines the technical steps for integrating a new gateway with Paid Memberships Pro, it should be noted that it is not an “easy” thing to do.

Depending on the complexity of the gateway’s API and what features you need to support, adding a new gateway can get very costly. In particular, supporting subscriptions and recurring billing greatly increases the complexity of adding gateway support.

We spend tens of thousands of dollars each year maintaining the gateways bundled with PMPro. Developers will likely charge a minimum of $5,000 USD to start a project like this.

This post below covers the non-technical aspects of adding a new gateway to Paid Memberships Pro.

Option 1: Use WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress and has integration with a lot of gateways that we don’t support natively. The WooCommerce add on for Paid Memberships Pro can be used to connect the two plugins in a way that users checkout with WooCommerce, but membership access is managed with Paid Memberships Pro. If you do decide to use WooCommerce because of a gateway it supports, consider strongly if one of the WooCommerce subscription or membership plugins will work for you. A solution that only involves WooCommerce and WooCommerce Add Ons will generally be more foolproof than one that links our two plugins together. Many people use PMPro with WooCommerce (at least 7,000 sites at last count), but the decision to do so should not be taken lightly.

Option 2: Use a different membership plugin

If another membership plugin has native support or an add on to integrate with the gateway or gateway option you need, consider using that plugin over Paid Memberships Pro. Integrating with a new gateway is very complicated and costly. It might be better for you to port one of our Add Ons to another membership plugin than to integrate PMPro with a new gateway.

Option 3: Organize a mob

If we start getting lots and lots of requests for a certain payment gateway, we will consider using our development time to add it as an option. Check if there is already an issue on GitHub about adding the gateway. If so, you can add a comment to the issue to show your support. If not, you can create a new issue to see if there are others interested in the same gateway. Recognize that the pace of open source software can be very slow. It can take many months to gather support and many more months to build and test a new gateway.

Option 4: Program it yourself

We have added hooks to make it possible to add new gateways into Paid Memberships Pro through an add on plugin. Our “gateway” class can be easily extended to support a new gateway (if you do the work of integrating with the gateway API) and it’s a fairly straightforward process to add the gateway as an option to the admin and checkout pages. Our documentation here goes into the details of creating a plugin to add a new gateway Again, note that this is difficult work, especially if you need to support subscriptions and recurring payments.