Cassette Nest

So it turns out that everybody needs to be collecting sales tax based on the location of their customers. Why doesn’t anybody talk about this? Why is Stripe so popular when you have to figure out all the tax amounts for various US states and other countries and then file the taxes yourself for everything? Seriously? Do people just pretend they don’t have to do this?

As far as I can tell, the best way to go about this is to use a “merchant of record” who basically acts as an intermediary between you and your customers. This intermediary is who directly handles all your incoming money and is responsible for dealing with your sales tax. And, for the benefit of that, they take a bigger cut of the transactions than Stripe. But that’s a pretty big value for the money if you’re not some big fancy place that can hire tax people.

All that to say, I’ve switched payment processing for Cassette Nest from Stripe to Paddle. I, for one, welcome our new merchant of record overlords. I hope you enjoy your new, even more compliant payment services. Honestly, there should be very little difference for you.

https://cassettenest.com/changelog/2021-03-04/

After a couple of lengthy chats with Stripe customer service, they were able to fix something (as yet unknown) on their end to enable my account to work in live mode (like I already thought it was). I learned that it wasn't working from a potential customer who said they couldn't pay. Payments now work, and they paid!

This is a long time coming and (as I mentioned previously) this is the second version of Stripe integration that I've done. I feel good about it for now, but we'll see what happens when people try to actually use it! 😅

This has been my full-time gig for the past few months, so it's exciting to get it to the point where I could potentially make some money from it.

A boring, but necessary step before starting to charge money.

I used Basecamp's documents as a basis for what I did.

https://github.com/basecamp/policies

Reading through and considering all the aspects of these documents led to some improvements to the overall infrastructure of the application too!

https://cassettenest.com/changelog/2021-01-26/

I had previously been using dj-stripe, but it turned out to be way more trouble than it was worth for this project. I had what I thought was a fully functional setup, but after laying dormant for months, I turned it back on to see it broken. And sometimes when it wasn't broken, I'd still get Django deprecation warnings. I got tired of relying on a third party tool that may or may not be updated in a timely manner. I'm sure it's a great product if you have complex needs and no time to roll your own solution, but it was overkill for me.

I tore all that code out and rolled my own solution that I could understand and test(!) from top to bottom. Felt great.

I still don't have any payment code live yet, but I'm a lot closer than I've been before.

I ended up using this article as the basis for what I did. I went beyond what it talks about in a lot of ways, but it was incredibly helpful to see a working example that was this easy to understand!

30 of them to be exact. It was probably all friends and family at this point, but I officially made $30 from T-shirt sales after the first 3 days of them being online. I've got a ways to go before breaking even on the illustration, but that's to be expected. Buy a shirt!