Ever since I launched Refactoring Redmine, Redmine Tips, and Authoring Ebooks I’ve only been setup to accept orders with Paypal. Part of this is because Paypal was the only viable option I had and part of it was because Paypal is an easy payment processor when selling things online (at least one-off purchases). I also didn’t want to invest a bunch of time into custom code to process credit cards or deal with the security that comes along with that.

Payment Processing

Don’t get me wrong, I know how to write payment processing code. That means I’m very familiar with how much of an effort it is. I think I’ve done half a dozen applications that process payments and have written 2.5 gateway adapters for active_merchant. (I say .5 because I extended a gateway I wrote to add some non-standard APIs for a client once). For SaaS apps or subscription services, sure custom code is a good fit. For one-off ebook purchases, no.

Paypal, ugh…

The problem with Paypal is… well, they are Paypal. I’ve had my account frozen once with a client payment before which makes me very nervous leaving anymore than $500 in the account at a time. Don’t even get me started on their reporting UI and how clear (not) the fee schedule is.

Stripe, yay!

So I’m happy to announce, I’ve finally integrated Stripe payments with all three of my ebooks. That means you now have even more ways to buy:

• Stripe using a credit card
• Paypal account transfer
• Paypal using a credit card

Since I’m using the wonderful DPD service, the purchasing flow looks exactly the same except you now have an option when checking out. I’m defaulting to Stripe because they aren’t Paypal (see above).

For those who don’t see my big blue boxes on the sidebar: Refactoring Redmine, Redmine Tips, and Authoring Ebooks.

Thanks