The current limitations of stripe are so great that it is not even possible to apply for stripe in some regions, and a plug-in like system should be provided to allow users to use different payment gateways.
There has also been a great deal of discussion in the community about alternative payment methods without a clear progression or answer of rejection.
Charges for some contents
Charges for file attachments
Article subscriptions
Business membership registration
Many features require the participation of payment in some scenarios, using external tools or automatic tools for synchronization, I think not a good way.
I would prefer the payment design to be similar to integrations, so that developers can add more payment methods.
Seriously, this. How do you handle payments for specific items on your site? Like individual downloads or extra content? I didn’t realize it was so limited.
Ghost’s is a blogging platform, at the core. For electronic products (the OP’s #2), you probably want something like Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, or similar instead. You could create this functionality on Ghost (using links to Stripe), but Ghost doesn’t check access permissions for non-post/page content (such as images or file downloads), and if you’re selling the contents of a link, you probably want a platform that does. It’s possible to fake that - I’ve got a not-pretty-but-functional shopping cart and checkout built on Ghost and Stripe and you could deliver automatically using Zapier (or anything else that’ll catch a Stripe webhook). But you’re right, that’s somewhat complicated, and it might be an indication that you’re getting pretty far from Ghost’s core mission.
But this is pretty basic functionality that already exists in a way with Stripe. Whatever the core mission is, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be to limit writers from selling ebooks or articles directly from their own website. Seems like shooting yourself in the foot…
Currently, a file (like an ebook) posted on a Ghost site is accessible to anyone with the link, and there’s not a user-specific link you could use for tracking to see if your product link has been posted publicly. I don’t think I’d want to put any product I was serious about selling on Ghost until/unless that changes.
You could create a product in Stripe, create a payment link for that product, and then customize the ‘after payment’ section to display a link to the purchased product. But I am not certain if the link will display before a bank transfer payment actually completes. You could also redirect to your site where the product is located. Those options are in the Stripe interface.