This information is current as of September 20, 2026.
Payments & Problems: Handling money is definitely one of the more massive agonies of selling products. Online retailers usually go with Stripe or PayPal for payment processing, because there isn’t anything better. The problem is chargebacks. A chargeback is when a customer gets a refund by telling the bank that the payment was not authorized, or they didn’t get the product. The seller then loses the payment and gets dinged (typically a $15 fee), and if the seller tries to challenge it, even with solid evidence, they could get dinged twice as hard. It used to be that sellers could challenge and win, but now it’s really unlikely.
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The Nuclear Winter: So a customer can buy five of your e-books, copy them, request a chargeback, and then pirate the books. Now you owe $75 for five chargebacks, and if you challenge it, you owe $150 in fees. Lovely. Oh, and then the crook puts your books on Anna’s Archive or starts selling your work on Amazon, and makes a copyright claim to get you banned off Amazon. There’s not a lot you can do to fight these crooks. For the copyright issue, you can register your copyright first, and hope Amazon cares. (Amazon is dealing with overwhelming traffic and crazy bots.) The more immediate problem though, is the chargeback fee.
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What to do? You can send all your sales through some other platform instead of your own website, and let that platform handle the money… so use Etsy, eBay, or Amazon platforms. A lot of sellers have resorted to selling “tokens” that customers can use to buy products. This system makes it easy for sellers to prove that the customer got their product, since the product is only a “token”. Now, though, it seems like proof doesn’t matter.
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You can accept checks and money orders the old fashioned way, in an envelope, in your postal box.
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The other option is use cryptocurrency, but your customers have to be really driven to get your product. On that note, there are certain forbidden items that will get you in trouble with fiat bankers. (Fiat is $ dollars, Β₯ yen, β¬ euro, Β£ pound, β± peso…) If you sell RED HOT SPICE, then PayPal’s bots and Stripe’s bots will find out right away and ban you and confiscate your money. The days of getting away with all that are gone. Maybe crypto will explode on the retail front for that reason. If you have banned books, they can only be sold via crypto, or an old-fashioned check in an envelope.
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Money Flow: It’s not enough to have a bank and a website. You also need a virtual cashier handling your shopping cart. The cashier is WooCommerce or Gumroad or LemonSqueezy…whichever one you pick. The cashier puts your payment processor (Stripe or PayPal) in front of the customer and automatically sends out your e-book after payment. The payment processor (Stripe or PayPal), sends the payment onward to your bank. Can you just use the bank and accept credit cards without a payment processor? Sure, but if you’re selling high-risk items, then in order to accept credit card payments directly, you need a “high-risk account” which costs $600-$1200/year. That option only makes sense if you are selling a lot (like 572 orders/year at $50 each). If you’re not selling items that need a “high-risk account”, you could set up a Merchant Services account with your bank for $10/month to accept credit cards online, but the banks are not great at connecting to virtual cashiers like WooCommerce. (It would be so cool if they were!)
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Payment Processors – Stripe vs. PayPal: If you want to establish multiple pen names, multiple trademarks, and multiple shops, then go with Stripe instead of PayPal. Stripe will put the correct store name on the customer’s receipt and bank/card statement, and PayPal does not have that option if you have more than one store. If the customer sees some other name that they don’t recognize, they’ll call it in as fraud and you’ll get a chargeback fee. Etsy will also show the right store name, and you can have many Etsy accounts. Shopify will show the right store name if you set it up to only accept Stripe, not PayPal.
Crypto for Payments: I absolutely recommend offering crypto as a payment option, and what I do is set my WooCommerce plug-in to work with the CoinSnap plug-in as co-cashiers. CoinSnap is a cryptocurrency cashier. CoinSnap tells WooCommerce that payment was made, and then WooCommerce sends the e-book to the customer, and a notice to me of a new sale. At CoinSnap, I only allow customers to pay with BTCLN (Bitcoin Lightning) because it is instant and low-fee, and works with CashApp. I’ve tried other products for each of these steps, and they were lacking! CoinSnap is a gem. Their fees are low, but you need to prepay for the fees, so deposit $10 or so for your first crypto sales, and more as needed.
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For customers new to crypto, I recommend that they set up and use a CashApp account – that is absolutely the easiest way to buy and send crypto, and CashApp allows them to buy BTC, and send BTC to your BTCLN wallet (thereby becoming BTCLN). As long as you don’t give the customer a BTC wallet instead of a BTCLN wallet, all will be fine. BTC (Bitcoin) and BTCLN (Bitcoin Lightning) are the same coin, but moving on different networks. BTC is slow and high fee, BTCLN is fast and low fee.
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Encouraging Crypto/eBooks: I’m doing what I can to get customers into e-books and crypto by making recommendations that are simple and offering freebees to customers who try it. You’ll notice that I have a freebie for people who sign up for my mailing list, a freebie for people who try an ebook, and a freebie for people who make a crypto purchase.
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Crypto Ideas to Beware of: When you hear about certain wallets (like Phantom and Wallet of Satoshi), being super easy to set up: That may be true, but buying crypto is different than storing/moving it. As a result, I have a whole post all about how to get your cash back in hand and off of Phantom. I also tried to use NOWpayments (instead of CoinSnap), but it only accepts BTC, not BTCLN. The other great coins for being instant and low-fee are USDC Polygon and USDC Solano. Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to buy them. I also tried a bunch of other popular alternatives to CoinSnap, and they were barely functional.
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How to Get Your Money after Cryto Payment: After the customer sends the payment to CoinSnap, CoinSnap converts and sends it to your bank. The CoinSnap POS Wallet App will also give you a stable BTCLN wallet address that is all yours – pick a cute one that’s easy to remember. (Be careful not to install the wrong app on your phone… type in “CoinSnap POS Wallet” to find the right one.)
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Special Exception: If you don’t plan to sell anything but e-books, then you can go with EasyDigitalDownloads (instead of WooCommerce), but you’ll still want to connect it to CoinSnap for crypto.
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