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Stop creating your Laravel invoices manually

Every Laravel E-commerce project requires processing payments and generating invoices. Yet for the best experience this flow needs to be tailored for each project.

Just to give you a few use cases:

Sometimes a successful payment is confirmed with an invoice receipt. That’s the simple use case.

And sometimes there is no payment (yet) but there still is an invoice. In this case the customer pays some time after receiving the service/product. Or it’s a correcting invoice accompanied by an outbound payment.

There are probably other use cases.

And what’s common for all of these?

All these use cases require an invoice generator.

So that’s why I have created laravel-invoicable. You can use it to create your tailored payment process. Together with laravel-payable-redirect-mollie for example (see previous post).

Using this package, you can:

  • create an invoice
  • add lines (items) to the invoice
  • add seller info to the invoice
  • add customer info to the invoice
  • add payment info to the invoice
  • calculate taxes and totals
  • generate a pdf of the invoice
  • handle discounts*
  • set the currency
  • set invoice status

* You can handle discounts by adding a line with a negative amount, or describe it in the line description field (“product x incl 30% discount”) and subtract the discount manually.

Ready to stop creating your Laravel invoices manually? Check out the github page for more information and code examples.

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Easy Mollie payments with Laravel

In the previous post you learned that Cashier is not always the best fit for payment processing in Laravel. And if that’s the case you will need to integrate payment processing manually into your application.

Personally I have been integrating the Mollie gateway into Laravel projects targeting a Dutch customer base. This way it is possible to accept iDeal payments – which is the preferred method of my customers.

The major take-away?

Fully integrating a payment gateway manually becomes tedious very fast.

You could use the official Mollie PHP client, the Omnipay Mollie client or the Mollie Laravel client, but these only help you redirect the customer to the Mollie payment page and redirect them back to you afterwards.

You will still have to do other things. The webhook route and controller still need to be written. Also you probably want to keep matching payment records in your own database and fire Laravel Events when the payment status changes. And as a best practice cover all this functionality using unit tests…

Yes that’s a lot of work, yet is the same for most  e-commerce projects.

That’s why I’ve created the laravel-payable-redirect-mollie package (yes that’s a mouthful) to integrate this all at once.

For your benefit I have open sourced it.

Take a look at the package’s github page for more details and installation instructions.

PS. As a last step in the payment process you probably want to generate an invoice (html/pdf) and provide it to the customer. There’s a package coming up for that as well. Stay tuned.

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When Laravel Cashier will not help you

Laravel‘s official Cashier package is great for handling credit card payments and generate accompanying invoices. I love it.

But what if you need to implement other payment methods than credit cards?

It took me a few projects (months…) to figure this one out, now let me save you the effort and share it with you.

The Dutch: funny people

In The Netherlands, the majority of the customers prefer to pay online using iDeal.

iDeal is a well-designed secure payment process which requires the customer to use a debit card, its PIN and usually a special hardware token. (So it basically is a 2-factor authentication method.)

In terms of usability and conversion rates it comes down to supporting what your customers prefer to pay with.

Like it or hate it, iDeal is simply the most trusted online payment method in The Netherlands.

Laravel Cashier does not support iDeal. So bye bye Cashier!

So what is a nice payment gateway supporting iDeal?

Meet Mollie

For projects targeting The Netherlands, I integrate Mollie‘s payment gateway.

Mollie redirects the customer to a highly optimised payment page, offering a multitude of payment methods including iDeal and credit cards. After payment a) the customer is redirected to a URL of your choice and b) a configurable webhook is called to notify you of any payment status updates.

Like other major payment providers it offers helpful integration libraries, extensive documentation, a rich API, a testing mode, the necessary payment handling tools (i.e. refunds) and a nice dashboard to keep an eye on your revenue. Support for recurring payments has been added recently.

Oh, and the pricing is competitive for sure.

Integrating Mollie into your Laravel application

Supporting iDeal payments with Mollie is actually quite easy. You can take several routes.

You could call the Mollie API directly (i.e. using GuzzleHttp). Probably not the best idea as it is cumbersome and error-prone to implement.

Or you could use one of the existing packages:

HOWEVER, this only will help you let the customer complete the payment. After that it gets a bit messy. So what comes next, after the customer has paid?

You will need a way to process the payment. Make sure your application gets notified of payment status updates and generate invoices.

After implementing and testing this in a few projects, I have decided to start packaging the whole Mollie payment process functionality and share it with you. Stay tuned for next blog posts.

Extending Cashier to support Mollie is not an option

Cashier is great because it supports all three requirements discussed above:

  1. Let the customer make the payment
  2. Process the payment in your app
  3. Create an invoice

So it would be great if we could simply swap out the payment gateway and benefit from the other functionality.

After analyzing the Cashier code, extending Cashier to support iDeal unfortunately appears to be a no-go. The package code is strongly tied to (initially) the Stripe and (later) the BrainTree payment gateways. It is not engineered (yet) to support other gateways in the future. It also surprised me  that the invoice generator is not covered by a more generic interface.

Stripe and BrainTree allow the customer to pay without leaving the merchant website using a payment token under the hood. iDeal requires the customer to pay using a redirect. This significant difference in the payment process (token vs redirect) is another reason why it will be very hard to implement iDeal into Cashier.

And how about Laravel Spark?

When it comes to supporting other payment gateways, Laravel Spark suffers from the same issues as Laravel Cashier does, because it is based on / architected the same way as Laravel Cashier.

Therefore I use Cashier and Spark only for projects targeting a highly international customer base.

So what should you do?

What will be the best Laravel payment and invoice solution for your project depends on what payment method the customers prefer. For credit card payments, be sure to check out Laravel Cashier. It will fulfil most projects’ requirements.

If you need to support iDeal, go with Mollie and one of the packages described above. And be sure to stay tuned for my next blog posts, as I am launching some packages to help further integrating Mollie payments and invoicing in Laravel apps.