Hi all … has anyone run into any problems using the same Stripe account/business for the membership/subscription integration and also using a Stripe payment link/page for one-time/additional donations.
The good folks at Ghost support suggested that could be a problem. I’ve seen forum posts that use a Zap to sign those folks up but it appears to have hiccups/admin to do.
Anyone have experience? Do I need to create a second business in the Stripe account for the tip jar/additional donations (as Ghost support suggested) or use a different tip jar solution like a PayPal donation page or GoDaddy payment? Trying to keep as simple as possible.
Our use case is the same as @Berkeley_Scanner: Free subscribers get full access and we upsell voluntary paid subscriptions and one-time donations when folks are so moved.
I use a tip jar that’s linked to the same Stripe account. I have not seen problems, but if Ghost Pro support is telling you it’s a bad idea, they might be right!
It’s super easy to create a second business account - Stripe makes that really easy, so not much reason not to?
My tip jar blog post is here, for anyone interested:
Great, thanks for all this. I’ll take a closer look at the additional business in Stripe and see what’s involved.
When your existing subs give via the tip jar, using their same email address, does anything flow back into Ghost? I think that’s the possible issue. Another thread suggested a new person/email address will come across as a free sub?
Still learning my way around Ghost so apologies if this has all been sorted elsewhere!
I’m not sure any of my existing subs have used the tip jar.
Actually, hang on, that’s not true. I tipped myself a dollar at one point while testing… will look! Nope, no sign up the tip impacting the free plan my admin user has.
And I just tried tipping myself again using an email that’s not in ghost. This does not cause that email account to show up in Ghost as a member or anything.
But… if you’re concerned, making multiple Stripe accounts is really easy.
Thanks, @Cathy_Sarisky! I had also inquired of Support about enabling a custom domain with Stripe (alongside the Ghost custom domain for the site), so the payment URLs would be pay.oursitename.com instead of buy.stripe.com, but was told that only the default configuration/integration is officially supported at the moment.
For anyone messing with tip jars/additional support, I also learned about rates charged by a few providers for donate buttons/pages. Currently (Feb. 2024):
GoDaddy Payments: 2.3% + $0.30/transaction (uses pay.yoursitename.com), can have a large logo, a text description, and a field for user-submitted notes.
Stripe (as described above): 2.9% + $0.30/transaction, small logo, “product” name, and text description.
PayPal Donation Page, to receive PayPal payments or credit-card payments, allows for more customization, including a large image, checkbox to “help cover the fees” with auto-calculated amount, and an optional drop-down “Use this donation for” that can be populated with many rows. It also produces a link, QR code image, and button. But it can be more expensive: Default rate is currently 3.49% plus $0.49/transaction (or 1.99% plus $0.49/transaction for registered nonprofits). If you already pay for Payments Pro, it’s lower.
For a long time, I did have a Zap set up to create a member in Ghost for the tip jar payments — but that was what created some funky things that would take too long to explain.
If you have a paid Zapier account, I think it’s possible to set it up better that I did, but it’s pretty expensive and wasn’t worth it for me. MOST of my payments are recurring, not tip jar, so now I just create a new member for tip jar payments when I need to do so. It’s probably a few a week at most so it’s easy, and most of them are already in the system in some way because they signed up for the newsletter already.
I have asked Ghost to add a one-time payment option that was baked in, but I get that there are pluses and minuses to that approach.
Most local indie online news sites in the US offer recurring as well as one-time payment options in exchange for membership. I wish Ghost had that as well. But I also get that we want to emphasize the recurring option as much as possible.
Many of you probably already noticed, but those reading this thread might be happy to learn that Ghost just released a tip jar feature powered by Stripe: