27 Part Journey to Starting a Side Hustle — Day Fourteen
Ohh the joys of figuring out how to get paid. There are so many options to pick from and I still haven’t figured out how to open up a business account. The book has you comparing Paypal, shopify, stripe, and I added Square just for kicks. Over the last 25 minutes I’ve learned more than I thought I would ever learn and also realized that with so many options, this stuff is complicated. Paypal is the most known and most accepted. Shopify and Stripe making an ecommerce site easy but their in person shopping isn’t as intuitive. Since most, if not all my traffic is going to come from my site, I’m most likely going to go with the service that integrates the easiest. Square is basically out at this point since from what I gathered, they are mostly an in person type of business.
Paypal looks promising but I don’t think they offer their own ecommerce site like Stripe or Shopify do. What I mean by that is that Stripe and Shopify allow you to create your website on their service and then take care of the billing. Paypal allows you to integrate into whatever website you want. While this is great, I just want to get started right now. However, since my site is going to be a little more unique than what these companies offer out of the box, I might be better off creating my customized site and then integrating with Paypal.
This is a little frustrating since I think I’m running into a chicken and egg problem. I don’t think I want to prematurely pick a payment system, when I still don’t know what my interface is going to look like. The shopify and stripe sites look great if you are trying to sell items on the internet. They basically let you build your own mini Amazon. But, since I’m trying to build a recurring costs service site, I think making my own site and then adding payment integration would be best.
With that said, I’m going to do a little more research since I still have time to figure this stuff out. Right now, based on a few more minutes of research, I think I’m going to go with Paypal since they are the most recognized and most likely integrate the easiest. I also really want to look into Stripe a little more since they offer a wide range of API’s that might work out for me better in the long run.
Thanks for reading today. This payment stuff isn’t fun. I don’t even know if people are going to want to pay for my service and I feel like I’m worrying for something that may not happen. But, everything is figureoutable and I’ll conquer this challenge as I get more smart about how this payments world works. Keep reading if you want to see me fumble and stumble my way through this. Once I figure it out, I’ll make sure you learn from my mistakes. I anticipate making many over the next few days.
