From the original series, Do the Woo.

When you are creating your first, smaller online store, choosing a payment gateway can sometimes be a challenge. You often decide on a single one to get started and go from there as your store grows. But is that first choice the right choice? Listen to me as I share with your a short story about my experience with PayPal and Stripe with a membership site I started.

Whether you are creating sites for clients, doing it for your own store, or just considering the payment gateways for an existing small shop, this will give you some food for thought.

Thanks to your sponsor Conversio (formerly Receiptful)

Transcript

You can also download the transcript of this show: Do the Woo Transcript August 17 2016

Hey everyone and welcome to episode 27 of Do the Woo, a podcast for WooCommerce Shop owners. Bob Dunn here, also known as BobWP on the web. Today’s show is typically a bit shorter than our usual podcasts, but I wanted to share an experience I personally had sometime ago that may help you if you are just starting our with you WooCommerce online store, especially a small store. I call it the Tale of Two Payment Gateways.

But before I jump into this, a couple of things I would like to have you consider. First, we are still looking for some of you to ease on over to iTunes and leave a rating and review. As we head into our 6th month of Do the Woo, it would be so much appreciated.

And if you are a developer that uses WooCommerce for clients, not only do we want you to continue to tune-in, but also consider sponsoring a show. Same goes for any of you that offer a WooCommerce related theme, plugin, extension or service. It’s your support that will keep Do the Woo on the air.

Lastly, Do the Woo will be heading to WordCamp US in Philadelphia in December. So keep an eye out for those updates.

With that all said, let’s return to my story. To set the scene, first let me tell you that I have been using PayPal for a long time. No matter what horror stories you have heard, for me it’s worked great. Because of my sale level I have not needed to go to a merchant account, nor would want to get involved with it. PayPal has just made it easier for me.

The story takes place around a couple of years ago when I was making yet another attempt at a membership site. Of course I was using WooCommerce, but at that time the site protection was the Groups extension, so it was quite a bit more limiting than the current Membership plugin that’s available. In any case, I had launched the site and was pondering the payment gateway Stripe. Mainly because a lot of my friends and colleagues were raving about it and many felt they were going to move away from PayPal entirely, for several reasons.

Now I had been listening to all of this long before I launched this site, so it had been on my mind. But initially I just wasn’t ready to take PayPal off. In fact, I knew that it wasn’t a matter of dropping PayPal wherever I used it, but simply deciding whether I should try Stripe at all.

Then came the time awhile after the site launched. More and more people I know were raving about Stripe and the temptation was overwhelming. So one day I just said screw it. I’m going to get signed up for Stripe, buy the WooCommerce extension and go for it. A note for some of you who aren’t aware but, yes,