Episode 78: Payment Gateways, Tax Season, and Other Listener Questions

Today’s episode is sponsored by Pagely, the original gangsters of WordPress hosting. They’ve been around for a long time, but they’ve gone from humble beginnings to hosting huge brands. They’ve been able to figure out who their customers are and why they come to them. If you have scaling, security, or other “unsolvable” challenges, you can count on this solution-finding company. Go check them out at Pagely.com.

Today we will be dipping into our mailbag to answer questions. We’ll be doing this again, so if you have a question that hasn’t been answered, be sure to send it in!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

The best way to set up recurring payments, with or without a plug-in or an affiliate program.

What OS to go with when building custom routes in the REST API for a mobile app.

Suggestions on the best process for entrepreneurs to prep for taxes, including tips on how to keep all of your paperwork under control, preferably with the help of a bookkeeper.

How to track the users of the plugins, how they’re using it, what features they’re taking advantage of, and so on.

A payment gateway in addition to Stripe and PayPal.

Information about the update API for plugins, and how to hijack the update process.

Tips on project management: tools, validation, features, etc.

Links and Resources:

Pagely

WooCommerce

Paid Memberships Pro

Easy Digital Downloads

WP Affiliate Platform

WP Offload S3

Recurly

Google Wallet

Amazon Pay

Moneris

Freemius

Slack

Trello

GitHub

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 78. This time Pippin and I will be digging into our mailbag and answering people’s questions. But first–

–This episode is sponsored by Pagely, undoubtedly the original gangsters of managed WordPress hosting. They’ve been around for a long time, but man have they evolved over the last few years. From humble beginnings to now hosting huge brands like Disney, Visa, Comcast, ebay. I could go on.

They’ve also figured out who their customers are. They realized that people come to them with complex scaling, deployment, and security challenges, challenges deemed unsolvable by other providers. And so they made that their niche. That’s what they do. They provide solutions to these challenges.

Over the years their technology has seen big improvements as well. One of the biggest changes they ever made was moving all of their hosting onto Amazon Web services, and it has paid off big time for them. In fact, there was an S3 outage just recently, and they were able to stay operational. There was even a tweet I remember from Scott Bollinger. I looked it up and it reads, “Impressed that while AWS is down, my @Pagely site with AWS infrastructure is still up. Redundancy ftw” (for the win).

So if you have a big scaling problem, a big hosting scaling problem, you should definitely get in touch with the great folks over at Pagely. They’d be more than happy to chat with you and find a solution to your scaling problem. Also, check out Pagely.com for more details about their services and contact details.

PIPPIN: All right, so we’ve got a number of questions today. We’re just going to go down the list. If we get through all of them, awesome. If we don’t then we will keep cataloging them for future episodes.

This first one comes from Bharat Mandava. And I’ll apologize ahead of time if I or Brad butcher anybody’s names. Sorry. This question is, what’s the best way to set up recurring payments: self-hosted versus third party affiliate solutions such as Affiliate WP or ShareASale?

I think there’s really two questions in here. First, he’s asking about, like, setting up recurring payments, I would assume how to actually collect those recurring pa