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January 27,2025

Setting Up Payments Through a Chatbot in a Messenger? A Tutor’s Experience

When my Spanish tutoring business started to really take off, I quickly realized that handling payments wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped. First, I wanted to keep things transparent. Second, the payment process needed to be convenient for both me and my students—especially those studying remotely. It turned out that a chatbot not only simplified scheduling lessons but also streamlined payments. In the end, I chose the Domino Telegram chatbot builder and connected it to Stripe. Setting everything up was much easier than I’d initially expected.

First Step to Enable Payment Through the Chatbot

I began by creating a bot—surprisingly, it was very easy. Then, in my Domino account (I’m on the Starter plan, which is sufficient for my needs), I went to the Automation section. There, I clicked New Flow, then chose Start from scratch. Although Domino CRM does have an online school template (top-left corner), it turned out to be more advanced than I needed—my setup is simpler.

Flow.png

To attract students and simplify my own promotion, I decided to create a second trigger that launches the conversation via a referral link. Later, I can post this link on social media or send it by email. And if I click on it myself, I can conveniently test how the bot works in practice.

Referral link.png

Next, I added a calendar with available time slots for booking Spanish lessons. Each session is two academic hours for me. Notice how I save the student’s response: I created my own variable called “Slot.” You set this up in “Save response to a custom field”.

Calendar.png

Connecting BotFather and the Payment System

After that, I started a conversation with BotFather on Telegram. I used the command /mybots and found the correct bot (I have several). Then I selected Payments and chose my payment system, Stripe. You’ll need to continue until you reach the stage gives you your payment token. 

Stripe.png

Copy the token and paste it into the “Payment provider token” field.

It’s that simple! 

Final Takeaway

All in all, using a chatbot for my tutoring business turned out to be much simpler and more convenient than I ever expected. It helped me automate lesson sign-ups, integrate YuKassa payments right inside the chatbot, and even set up referral links for promotion.

Give it a try!