Recently, I helped some small business (less then 20 people) integrating payment module into their systems. I consider that it worths sharing the experiences, as this also benefit the cases include: selling code on Github, selling online courses on personal websites etc.
The payment platform manages everything for you
There are some payment platforms that manage everything for you. You do not need to bother to design the frontend UIs of “placing order” page (choosing the products listed on the page) and “paying” page (filling credit card information and actually transferring the money), not to mention the backend logics behind the UIs. The platforms do all these things for you. Let us take lemon squeezy as an example(Well, I swear I did not receive ads fee from lemon squeezy, but maybe they should do so :D).
For integrating lemon squeezy into a system, all a software engineer needs to do is:
Set a store page on lemon squeezy, fill the page with information includes: product information and payment information, as shown below. The customers should complete all the steps regarding buying products on the store page: select products, filling payment information and transferring money.
Fig.1 - An example of lemon squeezy store page Add a link to the frontend page where you would like to redirect the customers to the store page of lemon squeezy
Add a page for customers to activate the keys recieved from lemon squeezy. After a customer complete payment on the store page, lemon squeezy will return an activation key to the customer, the customer should use the key to claim the ownership of the product on the website. On the backend of the website, when activating the key, the software engineer needs to do two things: 1) validate the key with lemon squeezy; 2) activate the key with lemon squeezy.
With such payment platform, the software engineer only need to save the activation key and the order id returned from lemon squeezy. lemon squeezy provide a orders page for the store owners to check order information, as shown below.
Cons:
There is no perfect solution in reality. The cons of using lemon squeezy as I observed from my own experiences are:
User experience. Rediect to a totally seperate payment page affect user experiences regarding online purchasing in a bad way. In some countries, the page loading speed may need up to 30 seconds.
Trust issue. As the domain name for the lemon squeezy store page is different from the source site, it may create trust issue for the potential customers
Less control. High managed platform means little spaces for customization. For instance, the layout of the store page UIs are not in the control.
Type 2: Manage everything on your own
For this type of platform, a typical work flow is:
1 | select products --> select payment method --> place the order to the platform via RestAPI --> the platform returns a qrcode link for the customer to pay --> nortify the website the payment has completed |
in which you have everything in control, i.e. design UIs of products page and payment page, handling all the backend logics.
Pros and Cons
The cons of adopting the type of platform is that it may takes time to build it as everything is under your control. And the pros are clearly the opposite side of the cons of type 1 platform.
