This is the article that decides whether your checkout works.
The plugin is connected to Mollie, but Houzez still has to be told to sell things, which gateway to use, and what to do with each package. There are seven settings. None of them need code, and none of them take longer than a minute.
Work through them in order. Skipping one is the usual reason a setup “does not work” for no apparent reason.
A quick word about the menus first, because Houzez spreads its settings across three places in your left menu, and people lose a lot of time looking in the wrong one.
Theme Options is its own menu item, sitting on its own in the left sidebar. This is where almost everything in this article lives: Membership, Payment Gateways, Login and Register. It is not inside the Houzez menu, which is exactly why people cannot find it.
Real Estate holds your Properties, Agents, Packages and Invoices. Your packages live here.
Houzez holds the design tools: the Theme Builder, the Fields builder, and so on. You will not need it for any of this.
So when this article says “go to Theme Options”, look for it as its own item in the left menu, not underneath Houzez.
Step 1: Tell Houzez to charge for something
This is the master switch, and it is switched off when Houzez is installed. If you leave it off, no checkout will ever appear, no matter how perfectly everything else is configured.
Go to Theme Options, then Membership.
At the top you will find Enable Paid Submission. By default it is set to No.
You have four choices, and they decide your whole business model.
No. Everything is free. No payments anywhere. This is the default.
Free (Pay For Featured). Listing a property is free, but agents pay to make a listing featured.
Per Listing. Agents pay for each property they list.
Membership. Agents buy a package, and that package lets them list. This is what most agencies choose, and it is the one that gives you recurring income.
Pick the one that matches your business, and save.
If you are not sure, pick Membership. It is the most common setup, and it is the one the rest of these articles assume.
Step 2: Put Houzez on the right payment gateway
Go to Theme Options, then Payment Gateways.
The first setting is Choose Payment gateway type, with two options.
Houzez Custom Gateways. This is the default, and this is the one you want. Our plugin plugs into it.
WooCommerce. This routes all payments through WooCommerce instead, and it needs two extra plugins to work. Our plugin does not use it.
Make sure it is set to Houzez Custom Gateways.
If this is set to WooCommerce, Mollie will simply never appear at your checkout, and nothing in our plugin will tell you why. It is worth double-checking.
Step 3: Switch your methods on at Mollie
A payment method has to be switched on in two places: in your Mollie account, and in our plugin. On in only one of them means it does not appear.
In your Mollie dashboard, go to Settings, then Payment methods, and switch on the ones you want to offer.
If you plan to sell subscriptions, switch on SEPA Direct Debit here too. Even if your customer pays with iDEAL, the renewals afterwards are collected by direct debit. Without SEPA Direct Debit, renewals simply will not be collected, and you will not find out until a month later.
Step 4: Choose what your customers see
Back in WordPress, open Mollie Payments, then the Payment methods tab.
Tick the methods you want to show at checkout. Nothing is on by default, and that is deliberate: we would rather you choose than have you accidentally offer a method you do not actually have.
Next to each method is a small label. Read them, because this matters more than it looks.
Subscriptions means the method can carry a recurring payment.
One-time means it works for single payments only.
Of the thirty methods we support, twelve can carry a subscription and eighteen cannot.
The ones that can include iDEAL, Bancontact, credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay and SEPA Direct Debit.
The ones that cannot include Google Pay, TWINT, BLIK, Bank Transfer, Przelewy24 and paysafecard.
So if you sell memberships that renew, make sure at least one Subscriptions method is switched on. Otherwise a customer will arrive at your checkout with no way to subscribe, and you will never hear about it.
Keep the list short. Four familiar options convert better than twenty unfamiliar ones. In the Netherlands, iDEAL plus credit card covers almost everybody.
Click Save.
Step 5: Switch off Houzez’s own payment methods
This is a step, not a suggestion. Do it now, before you go any further.
Houzez comes with payment methods of its own: Stripe, PayPal and a manual bank transfer. They do not disappear when you install our plugin, and they do not merge with it. They simply sit next to Mollie at your checkout, as separate blocks.
Your customer then sees two or three payment sections stacked on top of each other, with no explanation of which one to use. It looks broken. People do not hand over their card details to something that looks broken.
So switch them off, and let Mollie handle everything.
Go to Theme Options, then Payment Gateways. In the menu on the left of that screen you will find three subsections. Open each one and switch the gateway off.
Stripe Settings. Switch off Enable Stripe.
Paypal Settings. Switch off Enable PayPal. You are not losing PayPal: we already offer it through Mollie, so you can simply tick it on our Payment methods tab instead. Same PayPal, one checkout, one place to see the money.
Direct Payment / Wire Payment. Switch off Enable Wire Transfer.
Save.
Now go and look at your own checkout. You should see exactly one payment section, with the methods you chose. That is what your customers should see too.
If you genuinely want to keep one
You can. Houzez’s own gateways keep working alongside ours, and nothing breaks.
There are reasons to do it. Some agencies want to keep offering a manual bank transfer for large corporate clients who insist on an invoice and a wire. That is a fair reason, and it is your call.
But be honest about the trade. Every extra block on the checkout is one more decision for your customer, and every decision costs you a few of them. Unless you have a specific reason, switch them all off. Mollie already covers more methods than Houzez ever did.
Step 6: Leave the Stripe fields on your packages empty
Go to Real Estate, then Packages, and open one of your packages to edit it.
You will see two fields called Package Stripe id (Example: gold_pack) and Stripe Tax ID.
Leave them both empty. Mollie does not use them.
Stripe makes you create a plan in advance and paste its ID into your package. Mollie does not work that way: it simply charges the amount you set. There is nothing to look up and nothing to paste.
Empty is correct. Nothing is broken. You can ignore those two fields forever.
While you are here, ignore two settings in Theme Options, Membership as well: Enable Recurring Payments and Auto Recurring Payments. Houzez’s own help text says these are for PayPal and Stripe, and it is right. They do nothing for Mollie. Leave them off.
Step 7: Tell each package whether it renews
This is the most important setting in the whole plugin, and it is the biggest difference between us and Stripe.
Still in Real Estate, then Packages, editing a package: scroll down and you will find a block called Mollie Settings.
There you choose, for this package:
One-time payment. The customer pays once and gets access for the period you set. When it runs out, it runs out, and they have to buy again.
Subscription. The payment renews automatically until the customer cancels it themselves. This is what turns your income from a series of one-off sales into something predictable.
You set this per package, so you can happily offer both. A cheap one-off listing package next to a monthly agency subscription is a perfectly sensible thing to sell.
While you are in the package editor, the fields that actually matter to you are Billing Period (Day, Week, Month or Year), Billing Frequency (the number, so 1 plus Month is monthly), Package Price, and how many listings and featured listings are included.
Step 8: Let new customers register while they pay
If a brand new visitor, not logged in, should be able to sign up and pay in one go, then two settings have to be on. If either is off, Houzez refuses the registration and shows your customer the words “Access denied”. They will have no idea why, and they will not come back.
First: in WordPress, go to Settings, then General, and tick Anyone can register.
Second: go to Theme Options, then Login & Register, and switch on Register.
Careful with that second one. Houzez describes it as “Display the register in the header”, which makes it sound like it only hides a link in your menu. It does not. It blocks registration completely. Switch it on.
Both of these together take about fifteen seconds, and they are the difference between selling and not selling.
Step 9: Apple Pay and Google Pay
These two need one extra thing. Apple and Google want proof that you own your website before they will let anyone pay on it. This is called domain verification.
The good news is that Mollie does nearly all of it for you. In most cases you have to do precisely nothing: switch the method on in your Mollie dashboard, make sure your site is on https, and it appears.
If your setup does need a manual step, the plugin has a plain-language guide on the Theme activation tab, and Mollie’s Help Center has the current instructions. Or just ask us.
What happens next
Everything is connected and configured. Now go and prove it works, safely, before a single real euro is involved.