Time is the fire in which we burn
I’ve got this website I’m working on and I’m trying to launch a new product. 1 The last time I launched something there I built a quick hacky WordPress plugin using PayPal to serve up the product once a person had made an electronic payment. Not only was it hacky, but looking back almost 2.5 years at that code I want to cringe.
Here’s part of the problem. I hate PayPal so much. They have ugly payment buttons, all the buttons are branded PayPal – which is a mixed blessing2 , unless you have a merchant account your users have to go through PayPal’s payment screens on their site – which causes users no end of angst, the user has to sign up for a PayPal account – which is a whole new layer of tech support nightmares when dealing with the technologically challenged, and I could go on.
I figured I’d give Stripe a shot, it’s supposed to be developer friendly. After wrestling with it for two hours I’m giving up. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that I’m tired and I’m just not getting it and it’s easier to think like myself-as-a-crappier-coder-two-and-a-half-years-ago and fix up what I’d written than it would be to learn Stripe and shoehorn new code into my old code.
Some days I just want to tear down that website and start from scratch. I just don’t have the time.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m loving this new CompFight WordPress plugin. I’m extra happy about it since I contributed a quick one-line fix that helped improve the plugin. This one little plugin is going to basically make it about 100 times more likely I’m going to be able to drop a fun image into my posts. CompFight is a website that streamlines searching for Flickr CC licensed images. I was actually toying with the idea of making such a plugin when I found out they just developed their own. Awesome.
- Photo Credit: Riccardo Cuppini via Compfight [↩]
- Good: People know and trust PayPal. Bad: It’s freaking PayPal and kinda looks hokey. [↩]
The flip side as you say is that people know and trust paypal.
Having a paypal account it’s now my 100% preferred payment method. When I want to buy something I don’t want to sign up for a membership, I don’t want to sign up for some new payment service and I very definitely don’t want to give my credit card number to anyone.
If two sites have the same product and the slightly more expensive one has a paypal button I will swallow the extra cost without even finding out what hoops the other site wants me to jump through.
@tolomea: See, I respect that opinion. However, my guess is that since you are one of my readers – and therefore a clever, handsome, and techno-savvy individual – you are comfortable with PayPal. But, the consumers for my other website consist in large part of people who are not particularly technologically enabled, don’t have a learned trust of PayPal, and would distrust PayPal as much as they distrust most any unfamiliar person or website that would ask for their credit card data.