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8 Comments

Made my first sale using Stripe & a static website

Hey IndieHackers,

I made my first sale! The rush when I saw the Stripe email notification yesterday was something else.

I'm an SEO professional and Hugo developer, and my product is an SEO theme for Hugo.

I also rolled my own lightweight ecommerce implementation using Stripe Checkout to sell it. Aside: if you use Hugo and want to replicate this, I wrote a tutorial on the subject: https://moonbooth.com/hugo/stripe/

So it was a double rush when I made that first sale: my ecommerce build worked too! I did of course test it using Stripe's test mode, but you're not allowed to test live Stripe implementations, probably as a safeguard against money laundering. Anyway, now I know it works for sure!

From an SEO--and code simplicity--standpoint, I do love my ecommerce implementation. All SEO backlinks point to my site, and not to Gumroad or any other third-party marketplace.

Additionally, my sales page is just a blog post with a buy button (I did remove the email subscribe box on that page to avoid distracting customers from their purchase). I love simplicity, and I love building in a way that helps SEO.

Hope others find this useful, and if you're yet to make your first sale, perhaps inspiring too!

  1. 1

    "Limitation 2: Tax rates are not supported"

    Yes they are 😊 - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/taxes

    You store the applicable tax rates in stripe

    You're better of using a fixed tax rate of 10% through stripes api objects than including it in your price. This way you can generate correctly itemised invoices through stripe or yourself from stripes records to use as evidence for your tax obligations for your government.

    1. 1

      Hi Ian! Thanks for reading and for your comment.

      Stripe's documentation for Checkout assumes--perhaps understandably so--that the implementation will be in a web app, not in a static site.

      And yes, tax rates are supported in Stripe Checkout on web apps.

      However, it's only when you get to the specific documentation for static site Stripe Checkout implementations that we see tax rates are not supported [1]:

      "The client-only integration has several limitations: ... Coupons, Discounts, Promotion codes, and Tax rates are not supported."

      Not sure if this is a case of Stripe being unable or unwilling to add these features to Stripe Checkout for static sites. Thanks again for reading and commenting!

      [1] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/client

      1. 1

        Ah, that makes sense - thanks for clarifying. May be worth quoting or linking the docs as you have done here on the original post.

        1. 1

          I had linked to the “Stripe Checkout for static sites” page on my original post, but I can see I might need to call out that Checkout for static sites is different to Checkout for web apps. Thanks for the feedback!

  2. 1

    Great milestone, and beautiful website. Congrats 👏

    1. 2

      Thank you so much! High praise coming from someone who runs a design-focused business. Thank you and all the best with your logo startup!

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