Cash App Pay for Woocommerce

plugin logo
Cash App Pay on the checkout page
Cash App Pay plugin settings

Inspiration

After 2 years using the Cash App link to help thousands of merchants receive Cash App payments, the top Cash App WordPress plugin will now use the official Cash App Web Payments SDK to facilitate ecommerce payments.

The original idea came 2 years ago since a lot of customers wanted to pay me with Cash App and merchants I had helped before also needed a solution to allow Cash App payments. That is how the plugin was created.

But since there was no official integrations, the plugin used the cash.app/$cashtag/amount link to generate a QR code and link for customers to be able to pay the merchants and order products.

Now with the official integration by Square out, all these merchants now have an option to integrate with Square through the plugin on their sites and it has been pretty smooth transition.

What it does

Checkout with Cash App is a WordPress plugin that helps your customers pay you using Cash App Pay. This is for Woocommerce powered stores on WordPress.

Woocommerce provides an ecommerce system ready for WordPress users. My plugin extends Woocommerce and adds Cash App Pay as an additional payment method on the checkout page.

Merchants can add inventory on their shop page. And after a customer adds to cart, setup shipping options, etc. they end up finally on the checkout page where one of the payment options is Cash App Pay.

A button for Cash App Pay is created and when the customer clicks while on desktop, they can scan and authorize the payment and while on mobile, it prompts them directly in the Cash App to authorize payment. Once the payment has been authorized, they automatically return to the checkout page where they can finally place the order.

How we built it

The ground was already set 2 years ago when the original plugin was created. But the previous versions did not include any APIs or SDK other than for generating a QR code. So this new integration required adding the new details to set up the Square SDK properly and integrate it into Woocommerce and WordPress and also another platform (square.theafricanboss.com) was created to act as middleware between merchants and the Square app.

The system is built with PHP and WordPress. It uses a Square class containing all admin Square credentials which include the merchant ID, location ID, Access token and Refresh token. And every week, a cron job refreshes the access token to keep the connection active and all operations valid.

To add Cash App Pay to this plugin, I also created a second platform square.theafricanboss.com which handles mostly retrieving, refreshing and revoking Square credentials for the plugin to work.

Challenges we ran into and Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since this project required multiple platforms to work together, the entire project had to go seamlessly. Each of the platforms involved has a way of doing things so everything had to go perfectly for all parties involved.

So it required going through Woocommerce documentation, WordPress documentation and Square documentation. Then after making all the platforms work together, another platform at square.theafricanboss.com had to also be created to act in between and "represent" each merchant to Square.

Fortunately, it all came together and it has been live for a few days and it has been adopted by a few dozen sites. And so far, there has not been any major bugs requiring a fix or new version to be pushed. So that has been quite an accomplishment

What we learned

The main lesson on this project is how important good documentation is especially when integrating a few platforms together. This project started pretty late (in the last month) so its success has been due to extensive documentation coming from Square, WordPress and Woocommerce.

What's next for Cash App for Woocommerce

The mission for this plugin will continue as it has always been to help merchants receive Cash App payments. Woocommerce has a worldwide market share of 29% among all the websites using ecommerce technology (according to BuiltWith) higher than Shopify or Bigcommerce. So this plugin offers the top leading ecommerce software merchants the ability to use Cash App Pay as a payment method and we will keep doing just that. So far it has helped create millions of dollars in transactions with few merchants. Now it can help even more merchants who are already using Square and seeing the popularity of Cash App among their customers.