Website Tweaking

As noted in a recent post, I tweaked the WCG Comics website so that users can place orders right from the home page. The landing page immediately highlights the most recent and popular comics for sale, rather than news, announcements and promotion. While that latter content is still there—my website has also always served to document my comics activities—I realized that the sales buttons needed to be front and center.

On top of that, as part of the ongoing need to keep the site compliant with current web standards, I just migrated to a new payment processor. From the very start, I've used PayPal when my website was in simple html and, and later, css format, and have always been happy with it. My main concern has been that some users might believe a PayPal account was required to make a purchase (it isn't). However, PayPal recently began sending me notices that the protocol used at my site was out of date and should be upgraded. Unfortunately, I found the directions and requirements for PayPal's updated integration protocol to be beyond my technical abilities, so began exploring and testing other payment plugins that more seamlessly integrated with my WordPress website. 

Though it took me a little time to understand the whole ecosphere of the e-commerce process, I began by installing WooCommerce, a popular e-commerce plug-in for WordPress that works fairly seamlessly (WooCommerce is owned by the same parent company as WordPress). This turned out to be a no-brainer since WooCommerce works and partners almost universally with all the top payment processors. It was just a matter of determining which one worked best.

I first tried connecting WooCommerce to PayPal since I already had an existing account there, but surprisingly, the same obstacle related to the level of technical proficiency needed still existed, requiring a level of coding I wasn't comfortable with. I then tried WooCommerce's in-house WooPayments—without going too far into the weeds, I surprisingly found the verification process very complicated and frustrating. Though I understand the need to properly verify my business credentials, it seemed unnecessarily long and complicated, particularly given my experience easily getting approval from other processors and doing business online for more than 25 years. With all that—and even after exchanging some emails with the company (there was no chat or telephone option to speak with someone in person)—I felt caught in a loop with nothing to show for it. (To be fair, without going into the minute details, the delay was related to the need for the IRS to properly confirm my business status with paperwork I never needed before and that still needed to be processed.)

Frustrated by an exercise unlike my relatively straightforward and painless experience with other processors, I downloaded a plugin for Square, another prominent payment processor—indeed, I've used Square and have had an account with them for years to make sales at conventions with a credit card reader (and now with my mobile phone as a tap device). In contrast to PayPal and WooPayments, getting verified by Square nearly instantly turned out to be a very simple and straightforward.

So very long story short, after all that and some testing that went smoothly, the migration is done! (I should add that at one point in this process, when I was starting out and playing around, I somehow "broke" my website—fortunately, I had a backup—albeit not a recent one—that I was able to quickly restore. But it taught me a valuable lesson—to use the sandbox accounts I had created to test changes first and to back up my website more regularly!) 

While I don't believe the PayPal protocol was due to be retired or rendered obsolete anytime soon, the new plug-in processes orders all within the WCG Comics website umbrella rather than redirects users  to a third party website (PayPal) to complete a purchase. As a result, the process looks more seamless and professional. It's a change I actually wanted to make for awhile and I'm glad for once I was ahead of the curve in doing so when I had the luxury to figure it all out rather than under the gun because the protocol was being discontinued.