When JotForm launched in 2006, the company’s first priority was providing a quick way for clubs and organizations to gather personal details from members online. Payments were an afterthought.
JotForm only began accepting payments in 2012, with a streamlined approach via integrations with Authorize.Net, PayPal and Stripe that accelerated its business, and this month the company is taking what looks like a step backward in the digital era by adding check acceptance.
Organizations using JotForm may now opt to collect payments via electronic checks, an approach that many merchants migrated away from because of the risk of delayed funds and fees from checks returned for nonsufficient funds.
But JotForm’s customers insisted on having the electronic check option, said Chad Reid, JotForm’s director of communications.
“Initially we held off offering checks as a payment option because we realize checks aren't the future of payments, but we had so many user requests we finally reached the tipping point and said yes,” Reid said.
JotForm has many nontraditional merchants interested in driving payment costs as low as possible, and JotForm offers electronic check acceptance via eCheck.Net for a 0.75% transaction fee, significantly lower than the cost of accepting payment cards or PayPal. And these users aren’t as concerned with potential friction and costs associated with online check acceptance, because their use cases are atypical, according to Reid.
“We have a really wide range of organizations that aren’t necessarily traditional merchants—their typical payments might be one-time fees or donations—so they don’t have the same needs as merchants with higher payment volumes,” Reid said.
Pricing is based on member responses and include support for payments at different volume tiers ranging from free for forms requiring a single payment per month to $99 per month for unlimited forms with payments.
In the last five years JotForm has experienced double-digit growth, this year reaching more than 3 million registered users accessing about 10,000 different form templates covering vast use cases, Reid said.
JotForm in August teamed with First Data Corp., integrating its
