How to accept online payments for bookings in WordPress

Start by checking whether your chosen gateway is supported by your Bookly setup. Bookly lists Stripe Payments, PayPal, WooCommerce, Square, Mollie, Authorize.Net, 2Checkout, PayUbiz and PayU Latam among its payment integrations. Several gateway integrations require Bookly PRO and a separate add-on.

For a simple card-payment route, Bookly’s Stripe Payments option is configured through Bookly Cloud. If your customers mainly use a regional gateway, choose the matching Bookly add-on instead of trying to force payments through an unrelated checkout.

Create or verify the business account with your chosen payment provider and complete any identity, settlement and currency checks it requires. Keep the API keys, client credentials or merchant details available, but do not paste them into emails, page content or theme files.

Use HTTPS on the site and confirm that the gateway supports the currency and country where you operate. A booking can appear to work while payments fail later if the currency, merchant account or live-mode credentials do not match.

For a supported gateway, go to Bookly > Settings > Payments, enable the payment method and enter the credentials requested by that integration. With Stripe Payments, connect the Stripe account through Bookly Cloud first, then enable the Stripe Cloud method in the Payments settings.

Bookly also lets you reorder payment methods and enable offline payment. Disable Pay locally if every booking must be paid online. This manual route is fine when Bookly already supports your gateway; its drawback is that unsupported gateways need a separate add-on or custom development rather than a setting you can switch on.

Choose the currency in Bookly’s payment settings, review the payment option order and set the appointment status used after a successful payment. Bookly can change an appointment from its default status to the successful-payment status after it receives confirmation from the gateway.

Set the Time interval of payment gateway so an unfinished checkout does not hold a time slot forever. This relies on a scheduled cron job. If you offer deposits, configure the amount per staff member and service, and disable local payment when the deposit must be paid before the booking is accepted.

Place the Bookly booking form on a WordPress page using Bookly’s form button or shortcode, then make a test booking from the customer’s side. Check that the payment method appears, the amount and currency are correct, the customer returns to the right page and the appointment receives the expected status.

Test at least one successful payment, one cancelled checkout and one abandoned checkout. Check Bookly’s Payments list and the gateway dashboard. Do not treat a customer’s payment screenshot as confirmation: a gateway callback can be delayed, rejected or never arrive if the account credentials or site configuration are wrong.

If your customers pay through PayU Latam, install and activate the Bookly PayU Latam add-on alongside Bookly PRO. Then open Bookly’s payment settings, enable the PayU Latam method, enter the credentials supplied by your PayU account and save the configuration.

Run the same successful, cancelled and abandoned-payment checks before launch. This is faster than building a custom Bookly gateway because PayU Latam is already listed as a Bookly payment integration and the add-on supplies the connection between Bookly’s booking form and the gateway.