How to accept payments with Airtable Forms

Can you take payments through Airtable?

Unfortunately, similar to Google Forms, Airtable doesn’t include the option to take payments directly through its service. In order to accept payments through an Airtable form, you have to connect with a third-party payment processing service, like Stripe or PayPal, and connect it using Airtable automations with the third-party’s payment links.

We suggest using an alternate service like FormPay that has form capabilities and payments integrated so you don’t have to do complex configurations. FormPay gives you a beautiful form designed for ecommerce and smooth credit card payments, so you don’t have to worry about setup. 

Does Airtable integrate with PayPal or Stripe?

No, Airtable does not directly integrate with Paypal or Stripe. In order to use PayPal or Stripe with an Airtable form, you have to connect it using Airtable automations with Paypal and Stripe payment links. If you need to integrate Stripe to Airtable, you can use a service like FormPay instead that has payments directly connected to the form.

How to add payments to Airtable forms

The easiest way to integrate payments for Airtable forms is by using Airtable’s Automations feature where every time someone submits a form, you trigger an email with a pre-made payment link from a payment service like Stripe or PayPal to their email inbox.

1. Create a new Airtable base.
2. Go to the “Interfaces” tab in the base.
3. Press the “Start Building” button.

4. Press “Build a form” to create a form.

   

5. Add an email field to your form.
6. Publish the form.

7. Go to the “Automations” tab in the base.

   

8. Press “Add trigger” and select “When a form is submitted”. In the Configuration panel, select the Table in question and name of Form you just published.
9. Press “Add advanced logic or action” and press “Send email”. In the Configuration panel, for the “To” field, select “Email”. In the “Message” field, add your PayPal or Stripe payment link. To learn how to create a PayPal payment link, go here. To learn how to create a Stripe payment link, go here.
10. Test your automation and turn it on!

Issues with using Airtable forms to collect payments

The downside to doing it this way is that you can only send one payment link with one amount to everyone who submits a form. That’s ok if you’re charging everyone the same amount, but it wouldn’t work if you’re hoping to charge everyone different amounts based on what they selected on the form. Secondly, you’ll also need to manually reconcile who paid and who didn’t between the form submissions and payment records, which is additional administration that defeats the purpose of using the automation in the first place. Lastly, Airtable Automation is limited to only 100 automation runs per month and then you’d have to upgrade to a plan with a monthly fee that can cost anywhere from $20 USD or more per month. 

Free and unlimited alternative to Airtable forms for payments

If you’d like an easier way to collect payments from form submissions, we recommend using FormPay, an easy-to-setup form with payments all integrated. 

FormPay gives you an attractive branded form that allows you to charge different amounts to customers based on what they select, and the payments are all collected and verified in one go so you don’t have to worry about chasing down payments or doing more admin. You’ll also get an order dashboard to keep track of where all your orders are. 

With FormPay, there are no limits in the number of form submissions or payments you can receive per month nor is there a monthly fee. You just only pay a transaction fee every time an order is submitted!

Summary

It is not possible to accept payments directly through an Airtable form. However, you can use Airtable Automation combined with Stripe or PayPal’s payment link service to set up a way to collect payments from your customers. Be warned though, it’s not easy to set up the automation and there are limits to how many automation you can run on Airtable’s free plan. Alternatively, we recommend an easier solution, which is to use FormPay that gives you the ability to collect payments from your forms out of the box without any hassle.