Making a purchase is one of the first experiences a customer has with your business, and so it's vitally important to ensure that experience is the best it can possibly be.

With this in mind, in WHMCS 7.8 we've added support for multiple credit cards along with a whole host of improvements to the checkout and payment experience to make checking out faster, easier and more intuitive. With over 70 votes in the past 18 months, this was one of our most highly requested features and we're pleased to be able to deliver it alongside a number of other payment related improvements that provide a solid foundation to even more enhancements planned for upcoming releases.

The core aim of this feature development was to provide the following new functionality:

• To allow customers to add multiple credit cards to their account
• To provide better support for tokenisation gateways
• To allow customers to checkout faster

In addition to the above, we've done a lot of work to improve the user experience both admin and client side for checkout and payment completion, including:

• Simplified payment fields - card type is now automatically detected and expiry dates support keyboard input with automatic formatting
• Enhanced feedback and messaging - New and improved card validation for a faster and more intuitive payment experience
• Improved support for tokenisation gateways - enabling use of multiple token gateways concurrently and improved syncronization of token data
• Better contact management - now users can select any saved contact when adding or updating a saved payment method
• Support for bank accounts - users can now save bank accounts for use with ACH and Direct Debit payment gateways
• Improved developer support - new helper functions have been made available to make integrating tokenized gateways easier than ever before

The multiple pay methods functionality allows a customer to have more than one credit card or bank account saved and available to use during checkout. Each pay method also allows customers to set a description that helps them identify it. By the way, we're calling the new feature Pay Methods to help differentiate from "payment methods" which are used to determine the payment gateway used for billing a service.

There's new UIs in the client area and admin area for managing pay methods saved for a client, including a new panel in the admin client summary dashboard allowing you to view and manage all pay methods for a client user, along with updates and improvements to the offline credit card processing UI and tokenisation workflows throughout the product.

This new functionality enables customers to:

• Add multiple credit cards and bank accounts to their client profile
• Give each saved card a description to allow for easier recognition and identification
• Use any of their saved pay methods when checking out or paying an invoice
• Edit/update/delete a saved payment method at any time
• Set a default payment method to be used for automated recurring billing

Another major benefit of this work is to allow the use of multiple token gateways concurrently, which provides more flexibility for businesses wishing to process payments using tokenized gateways and/or switch between tokenisation gateway providers.

We hope you and your customers will find the added flexibility for multiple pay methods along with the usability improvements make a real difference to your day to day use of the WHMCS product. If you have any questions or comments, I invite you to ask them in the comments below.