Taking money online — card payments, deposits, late-cancellation and no-show fees — is part of the Tiger Booking Pro add-on. The free wordpress.org plugin ships no payment gateway code at all: it takes the booking, records it as unpaid, and leaves you to settle up however you already do.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking → Settings → Payments — a tab that exists only when the Pro add-on is installed.
Which build has this
Tiger Booking ships as two plugins. The free one from wordpress.org is the whole booking engine; Tiger Booking Pro is a separate add-on you install alongside it, never instead of it.
- Free plugin — the gateway files are not in the download. There is no Payments tab, no gateway keys, and no Deposits, No-show & cancellation fees or Card on file switches under Settings → Features (those switches declare a payments requirement, so the panel does not draw a control this build could not honour). The public booking flow ends at the customer-details step; the booking is stored with a payment method of onsite and a status of unpaid.
- Pro add-on installed and licensed — the gateway files load, the Payments tab appears, and the feature switches appear with it.
- Pro installed but not licensed — nothing is deleted and no data moves, but the paid endpoints answer
402and the screens say plainly that they need an active licence. Reactivating restores exactly what was switched on before.
Nothing in the free plugin is locked, dimmed or badged. If you cannot see a control described below, it is not present in your build rather than disabled.
What the free plugin does instead
You still get the full booking record, the customer profile, the confirmation emails and the admin workflow. What you do not get is a checkout. In practice that means:
- Customers book without paying; you take payment in person, by invoice, or through whatever you already use.
- Each booking carries a payment status you can set by hand from the booking detail screen, so your records stay honest.
- Service prices are still stored and shown, and still drive totals in Analytics.
Payment gateways (Pro add-on)
With the add-on active, turn on the gateways you want to offer and enter each one’s keys in its collapsible setup panel:
- Onsite Payment — accept cash or card upon arrival. No keys required.
- Stripe — Publishable Key, Secret Key, and an optional Webhook Signing Secret. Point a Stripe webhook at
/api/stripe-webhookso paid bookings update themselves. - PayPal — Client ID and Client Secret, with an optional Webhook ID at
/api/paypal-webhook. - Square — Application ID, Location ID and Access Token, plus an optional webhook signature key at
/api/square-webhook. - Razorpay — Key ID and Key Secret, with an optional webhook secret at
/api/razorpay-webhookfor UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets in India.
Secret keys are stored server-side. The booking widget on the front end only ever receives the publishable half — anything whose name reads as a secret is stripped before the settings reach an anonymous visitor.
Sandbox mode
The Sandbox switch runs every enabled gateway in test mode so you can walk the flow without moving real money. Use each provider’s test credentials while it is on (for Stripe, the pk_test / sk_test pair), then switch it off and swap in live keys.
Refunds
Allow refunds from a booking is off by default. Switch it on to add a Refund action to paid Stripe bookings; leave it off to refund from the Stripe dashboard instead.
Deposits & cancellation policy (Pro add-on)
The policy card protects revenue from no-shows and late cancellations, and applies to every booking type on the site:
- Deposit required at booking — a percentage from 0 to 100. 0 means full payment up front; 20 takes a fifth now and leaves the balance due later. The figure only applies while the Deposits feature switch is on.
- Cancellation window — how many hours before the booking a cancellation still counts as “late”. Defaults to 24.
- Late cancellation fee — charged when someone cancels inside that window. A percentage of the total, a fixed amount, or none.
- No-show fee — applied when staff mark a confirmed booking as a no-show. Same three shapes.
Assessing a fee records the amount owed on the booking. Collecting it automatically is a separate step — see below.
Card on file
Under Settings → Features, Card on file lets you save a customer’s card through Stripe so a fee or balance can be taken later, and Auto-charge fees to card on file collects an assessed fee without you chasing it. Both are off by default and both need the Stripe vault, so they appear only on a Pro install.
SMS credentials
Twilio credentials for SMS notifications also live on this screen, and SMS is likewise part of the Pro add-on. See Notifications & SMTP for the detail.
Troubleshooting
There is no Payments tab in my Settings.
You are on the free wordpress.org plugin, which contains no payment code. Install the Tiger Booking Pro add-on alongside it — you do not remove or replace the plugin you are already running, and no data is migrated.
Every payment screen tells me a licence is needed.
The add-on is installed but this site has no active licence. Activate one and the screens come back with the same settings and the same data; nothing was deleted while it was inactive.
Payments succeed but the booking stays unpaid.
Set up the gateway’s webhook at the URL shown in its panel so your site is told when payment completes, and confirm you are using live keys with Sandbox off. An enabled gateway with no webhook secret also raises a warning notice on the plugin’s admin pages.
The deposit field only takes a percentage.
Correct — the booking deposit is percentage-based. Enter 0 to require payment in full, or any number up to 100 for a partial deposit. Late-cancellation and no-show fees, by contrast, can be either a percentage or a fixed amount.