I’ve been taking care of a number of things lately that at one point would have been premature but are no longer premature.

When I first started selling my book I used Gumroad. Gumroad was a fine way to get started but it has a drawback in that it’s impossible (as far as I can tell) to measure conversion rates because the visitor is redirected off your site and onto gumroad.com after they click the purchase link. There’s also the drawback that you can’t control the layout of the Gumroad checkout or anything like that.

So, at the behest of my business coach, I’ve been working on moving from Gumroad to something more controllable. It’s been surprisingly hard.

First I switched to the “Gravity Forms + Stripe” WordPress plugin which seemed to work okay but I later discovered it doesn’t seem to support coupon codes. That’s a deal-breaker for me as my business depends heavily on the use of discounts.

One of the other solutions I tried was WooCommerce, which looked like the de-facto standard for WP e-commerce. I found WooCommerce to be pretty bad. The main problem I had was that after I created my product and indicated that it was a digital product as opposed to something that gets shipped, I went through the checkout process and discovered that all the address fields were still present.

I spent what felt like a very long time trying to get past my WooCommerce frustrations which were compounded by the fact that everything to do with WordPress development is so dumb. In WP, apparently every entity is shoehorned into a “post” type, and so when you edit anything, you get the same fields you get for a post for the most part, which in most cases only makes a very small amount of sense. I could rant about WP forever so I think I’ll just cut myself off right here.

Anyway, the WP e-commerce solution I ended up being pretty happy with is Easy Digital Downloads. Since I use Stripe, I had to pay for an $89 EDD Stripe plugin, but that will probably end up being cheaper than it would have been to use PayPal and pay their fees.

I also re-themed AngularOnRails.com. I finally found a WP theme I don’t passionately hate and I think I paid $69 for it.

Next steps include adding some certain addition opt-in offers to the site with the idea being to increase my rate of acquiring new subscribers.

I meet with my business coach again in a few days. I’ll be looking forward to hearing what he thinks I should do next.