Ultimately, the goal of every business is to get paid. Whether you're selling lemonades at the park or running a billion dollar shop, at a certain point you need to get paid and that comes with its load of challenges.
Over the last ~10 years, getting paid online has gotten so, so much easier. Gone are the old web days where we asked ourselves "can I really input my credit card into this form?". We no longer think about credit card safety online due to companies like Stripe and Paypal providing easy to implement and secure payment options for anyone.
That democratization is now coming to no-code! Although us no-coders don't have quite the flexibility of a developer building on top of Stripe, we do have quite a few options to get paid online without writing (much) code.
Here's how I would think about getting paid online; from the least to the most amount of effort (aka code):
Option 1: Use purpose built tools
No matter what your business, there's probably a tool out there trying to give you everything you need including payment. If you're a course builder that would be Podia or Kajabi. In fact there are hundreds of businesses fighting for your business. All of these require little code/effort to setup and are probably the best place to start getting paid online.
Option 2: Use horizontal tools
If your business doesn't quite fit nicely into what vertical tools offer, then you can use more horizontal tools that enable payment through 3rd party. Say you're like me and want to have full control over the styling of your course's page (a decision I regret) and still take payments without a bunch of code. In that case you can use Memberstack on any Webflow website. Memberstack handles the authentication, gating and payment processing for you (in exchange for monthly fee + processing fees).
If you're an e-commerce shop, you can build on top of Shopify which has a whole ecosystem of plugins allowing you to sell whatever you want!
Option 3: Build directly with Stripe
All of the options above use Stripe under the hood.
So why not cut out the middleman and use Stripe directly? That's increasingly possible as Stripe makes more and more of its building blocks (the API behind its product) usable by non-developers.
The most common no-code usecase with Stripe is to create Invoices. Invoices let you take one time payment for a specific product. Whatever tool you're using to track who has to pay you—that can be Airtable, Coda or anything else—you can create invoices from Zapier:
Another more recent option with stripe is to create Payment links which are permanent check out pages for a specific product. They're perfect if you sell the same product over and over to the same type of customer like an online course.
Payment links can be created via the Stripe Dashboard, using Zapier or via the payment links API. Check out this stream with Joshua Ackerman on how to use Payment links with Airtable.
The final (and quite new, it's still in beta) offering from Stripe is embeddable pricing pages for SaaS businesses. With a few lines of copy pasted code, Stripe will host your pricing tables (and payment page) for you. You can adjust it for your offering in a few clicks.
Two takeaways from all of this:
There is a tool out there that lets you take payment no matter how technical you are. The more technical you are, the more flexibility you have with how custom your business model can be.
The floor for building out custom payment flows is lowering really fast.
And for no-coders like us, that's great news.
Until next week, keep building!
Aron
