The Problem We Were Actually Solving
The problem wasn't that we were trying to sell online courses – lots of other platforms were doing it just fine. The problem was that our country was deemed high-risk by every major payment processor. We'd tried to appeal to PayPal and Stripe, but they wouldn't budge. We were left with a platform that couldn't sell courses, and a customer base that was getting restless.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
We tried using alternative payment gateways like Payhip and Gumroad, but they were either too expensive or too restricted themselves. Payhip had a terrible reputation for holding funds, and Gumroad had a convoluted pricing model that didn't scale. Meanwhile, we were burning through our engineering resources trying to get these gateways to work. It was clear that we needed a more creative solution.
The Architecture Decision
We decided to build a custom payment processor using Stripe's APIs (since we still had a valid Stripe account). We hooked up a region-agnostic payment gateway called Mollie, which supported over 30 currencies and had a decent reputation. We then created a proxy service to redirect customers to the Mollie payment page, all while ensuring our own server-side logic could handle the processing of successful payments. It was a lot of work, but we finally had a PayPal-free checkout experience.
What The Numbers Said After
The best part? It worked. Not only were we able to sell courses without relying on PayPal, but our conversion rates actually increased by 20%. We'd also managed to minimize the technical debt we accumulated from trying to shoehorn other payment gateways into our system. We'd essentially sidestepped the platform problem and created a better experience for our customers.
What I Would Do Differently
If I were to do it again, I'd invest even more time in testing and monitoring our proxy service. We experienced some minor issues with Mollie's error handling, which threw our server-side processing out of whack. A robust logging and alerting system would have saved us some grey hairs during those 3am calls. Additionally, I'd push for more robust analytics and feedback mechanisms to improve our payment processing experience in the future. After all, even with a workaround, a seamless checkout experience is still a top priority for any online course platform.
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