WooCommerce plugins for Mollie compared

When you have a WooCommerce webshop, you will want to link it to a payment provider. For Mollie, there are several plugins available that can achieve this link. These include the Pronamic Pay plugin, developed by Dutch company Pronamic, and the Mollie Payments for WooCommerce plugin, currently maintained by German company Syde. Both plugins are free to use.

To help you choose which plugin is most interesting for you to use, we will cover the main similarities and differences between the two plugins.

Mollie Payments for WooCommerce plugin

The Mollie Payments for WooCommerce is offered on behalf of Mollie. However, the plugin is developed by the German company Syde GmbH. This is a WordPress agency that mainly focuses on developing various WordPress plugins.

New versions of this plugin are released regularly and it is available for free in the WordPress plugin directory. Because the plugin is developed by an external party on behalf of Mollie, the support handling is not always clear. Should you contact Mollie for that, or Syde?

Pronamic Pay with Mollie for WooCommerce

The first version of the Pronamic Pay plugin was launched on 20-08-2011 and has been linking with Mollie ever since. Pronamic Pay links Mollie with multiple plugins, with WooCommerce and Gravity Forms being the first plugins supported. Since then, the plugin has been continuously developed and Pronamic offers very positively rated support, both in Dutch and English.

At Pronamic, the plugin is developed entirely ‘in house’. By listening carefully to the plugin users, features can be improved or added. In addition, this offers the advantage that support questions are better resolved. For this, Mollie and Syde depend on each other.

Both the Mollie Payments for WooCommerce plugin and the Pronamic Pay with Mollie for WooCommerce plugin have a good basis for linking your WooCommerce website. The setup of both plugins is slightly different and the Pronamic Pay plugin has slightly more features. For example, the Mollie Payments plugin has one settings page where a live and test API key can be entered. The Pronamic Pay plugin has more extensive settings to set up the Mollie configuration, among other things. This has the following advantages:

• You can create multiple configurations (links). For example, you can have a test and production configuration. This allows you to test new payment methods from your test configuration in addition to payment methods in the live webshop.
• With multiple configurations, you can, if desired, link payment method X to Mollie profile A and have payment method Y come in on Mollie profile B.
• The configurations can be exported and imported on another website.
• You can use multiple payment providers for different payment methods. If Mollie increases its prices, you can therefore easily switch.

Also read how to connect Pronamic Pay with WooCommerce.

What to look out for when choosing a payment plugin

You can use the following points of interest when choosing a payment plugin:

• Payment methods – Decide in which countries you want to sell and which payment methods you can best offer for that purpose.
• Recurring payments – If you want to offer subscriptions or memberships, you will want to be able to receive recurring payments.
• Ease of use for your administration – Do you want to link your webshop to your administration package or easily retrieve payments?
• Pass on transaction costs to customers – In some cases, you are allowed to pass on transaction costs to customers. Determine whether you need to.

Offer payment methods

One of the first questions you need to ask yourself is which payment methods you want to offer. It is usually advised to give visitors a choice of several payment methods. Choose the most common payment methods in the country where you sell. In the Netherlands, this is iDEAL anyway, but payment cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay are also popular (the latter will soon be supported by Mollie).

Both the Mollie Payments for WooCommerce and the Pronamic Pay plugins offer all payment methods offered by Mollie.

Setting payment methods per country

Both the Pronamic Pay plugin and the Mollie Payments plugin offer the options to set payment methods per country. If a customer selects America as their country at checkout, you can specify that iDEAL be dropped and that commonly used payment methods in America be displayed.

Recurring payments

You may also want to receive recurring payments. For example, if you want to offer subscriptions or memberships. This requires the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. This plugin allows you to set an interval such as, weekly, monthly or quarterly. The Pronamic Pay and Mollie Payments plugin both have support for the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

Both the Pronamic Pay plugin and the Mollie Payments plugin allow you to submit subscription payments to Mollie. The Pronamic Pay plugin has an advantage that the other plugin does not have.

For example, Pronamic Pay allows you to change the payment method for repeat payments. If the customer used credit card for the first payment, it can be changed to SEPA direct debit or PayPal, for example, without affecting the subscription. Being able to change a payment method can be useful, such as when a credit card expires, or if a customer no longer wants to use a specific payment method.

In the customer’s My Account environment, Pronamic Pay shows an extra button ‘Change payment method’ next to the subscriptions. This leads to a checkout page where you can change the payment method.

Administrative tricks

Another point of interest is the handling of orders in your administration. The Pronamic Pay plugin has a handy option to send a custom payment description for WooCommerce orders along to Mollie. This makes it easy to find your transactions in your Mollie Dashboard by product names, for example.

Karel-Jan wrote an extensive blog post “Payment descriptions for Mollie and WooCommerce” earlier.

Passing on transaction costs to customers

Passing on transaction fees to customers is prohibited by law in most cases. Nevertheless, it is done, especially if they are business-to-business transactions. Both Mollie plugins allow you to set surcharges for payment methods.

However, the Mollie Payment plugin has some known flaws in its payment method surcharges functionality. If another plugin also charges surcharges, the Mollie Payments plugin causes a problem with the display of the surcharges. But even if a first iDEAL payment fails, the Mollie Payments plugin will not charge the correct surcharges for a second attempt via, for example, a credit card. Customers can therefore bypass the set surcharges this way.

Furthermore, the Mollie Payments plugin does not have the ability to set a VAT rate for the fees. Mollie always charges the default VAT rate in WooCommerce for payment method surcharges, while in certain situations/countries there is no need to charge VAT on payment method surcharges.

The Pronamic Pay plugin has a better implementation for surcharging and therefore no problems with other plugins and VAT. You can set the different options for each payment method and it will be applied as it is supposed to work.

Premium features and add-ons

The Pronamic Pay plugin has a number of features for users who purchase a Premium licence. With this licence, users get priority for support questions. The plugin also offers a number of premium features and a number of add-ons.

The Premium add-ons are:

• Fundraising add-on: which allows you to create collection and crowdfunding campaigns on your website.
• Notification add-on: which allows sending messages to administrators and payers based on payments and payment statuses.
• Pronamic Pay WP All Export add-on: with which all payment data can be exported in a few clicks in combination with the WP All Export plugin.

Why should I choose Pronamic Pay when Mollie also has its own plugin?

In the table below, we have listed similarities and differences between the Pronamic Pay and Mollie Payments plugin.

Convinced to start using the Pronamic Pay plugin? Start using the Pronamic Pay with Mollie for WooCommerce plugin for free, or purchase a premium licence and benefit from the extras.