As I’ve mentioned in numerous blog posts over the past few months, the number and severity of problems we’ve had with FastSpring (which we had used for payment processing since 2019) finally became so great that we had to find a replacement in a hurry. I dropped pretty much everything and spent hundreds of hours doing programming and testing to get our site integrated with a different payment processor called Paddle.
I finally flipped the switch a few days ago, and ever since then, all orders have been processed by Paddle. There may be situations in the future where we’ll still need to use FastSpring (and it can always be a backup if something goes wrong with Paddle), but for the most part, everything will go through Paddle from now on.
The first thing I want to say about this transition is that, despite my best efforts, there were some slightly bumpy patches during the first couple of days. Customers encountered situations I hadn’t accounted for or couldn’t test adequately on our staging server, so I had to spend a lot of time fixing bugs, making tweaks, and putting in safeguards against unusual problems. Although we’ve had hundreds of successful orders since switching, a few customers (OK, exactly three as I write this) have had problems that I still can’t explain. In all three cases, I think I could have fixed the problems if I’d had enough information, but the customers gave up before I could help them. (This phenomenon is common enough that I wrote an entire page about it. Long story short: if something goes wrong, it’s probably not your fault, so please contact us before you waste a lot of time and get frustrated, and let us help you.)
Now, however, I’m seeing zero errors or warnings in our logs, and (fingers crossed) I think I’ve dispatched all the gremlins that I’m aware of. Orders are flowing in, books are flowing out, and everything appears to be just fine. Needless to say, if other things come up, I’ll deal with them as expeditiously as I can.
The checkout experience with Paddle looks a lot different than it did under FastSpring, but this is a good thing: there are fewer steps to go through, and nearly all the time, you’ll see download links right in your browser a few seconds after placing your order. (As usual, you’ll still get an email message, too, and the books will be available to download from your Library.) It’s faster, easier, and less confusing. And, it looks exactly the same regardless of which device, browser, or operating system you’re using—something that was not true under FastSpring.
Available payment methods are credit/debit card, Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, and iDEAL. Most crucially (for our audience), Apple Pay should now work in any country where it’s supported, and it should never fail with an inscrutable error message. Google Pay support is new; FastSpring didn’t offer that. On the other hand, I’m sorry to say that Paddle does not support Amazon Pay. There’s nothing we can do about that, and if you were a fan of Amazon Pay, I’m very sorry. But the loss of that one payment method seemed a small price to pay to end years of grief due to a long list of FastSpring problems.
Note that if you use a credit/debit card, Apple Pay, or PayPal, your statement will say PADDLE.NET* TAKE CTRL along with a city name that depends on your location—for example, it may say LONDON or ASTORIA. (For PayPal only, it will say PAYPAL *PADDLE.NET.)
It is a huge understatement to say that I did not have time to deal with this stuff right now. I have books to write, edit, and publish, and some of those have been delayed a bit while I worked on the transition to Paddle. Again, I’m very sorry about that, but this effort has all been in the service of making your experience better.
I can’t tell you how many dozens of times I’ve had to tell customers that, for bizarre or unknowable reasons, FastSpring decided to block them from making any purchases for 48 hours. Or that it could be months or years before they get Apple Pay working properly. Or that they’ve been charging people in the U.K. VAT on ebooks improperly for years. Or that orders with more than three books couldn’t be processed. The list goes on and on. When our customers are unhappy, I’m unhappy! So my sincere hope is that from now on, under Paddle, payment problems will be much fewer and farther between.