Another update with one major milestone finally achieved!
I have done a lot of improvements over the last couple of weeks with regards to the payment processing system but the major change is the ability now to pay with PayPal!
I will spare everyone the headache of explaining how ridiculously bad Paypal is! Sure, it’s great for users, I myself like to use Paypal when paying online, but from a developer’s perspective, it’s really really bad, and I guess people put up with it just because of its popularity. I had tried to do this back in May already, and I had to give up on it eventually, now I’ve redesigned the way I’m doing things and it’s much better, as it simplified the whole thing and it allows me to offer the free trial to Paypal users as well.
One big change as well is the new payment details screen. It may not look very different to you because the UI is practically the same, but it was entirely rewritten to use the Vue.js library, a reactive components framework that makes writing dynamic UI incredibly easy (at least, much easier than what I attempted to do before). This is important because I used that as a test bed for myself to learn how to use Vue and get myself ready to create better UIs. This will be extensively used for the new Assets Management interface, so it’s good that I got that done.
I wanted to also redo the subscription selection screen with Vue so it’s much smoother when you make changes to the UI, but I think I’m going to leave that to some other time as I’m eager to get started on assets, and I really want to finally do the story teller features! Yes, that interface could be improved greatly, but it’s not as urgent as the other stuff, so it can wait.
Regardless, I think I’m done now with the payment processing improvements. There’s still a few smaller things that need doing and I will keep slowly improving that aspect of the site, but I’m moving on now to concentrate my full attention on the assets library revamp.
That’s going to be a big task because it will involve a major rewrite of the backend that handles the assets, before I can tackle the actual user interface, and as usual, I do everything I can to make sure it has the least amount of impact on running games, but you should expect some maintenance period at some point when it’s all ready (I expect the maintenance would just be “you can’t upload new assets, but you can still access your existing ones”).
Here’s a list of the things related to the payment processing that I still want to do and expect will slowly be rolled out during the coming weeks as I do small updates while I work on the next big thing.
- Show a direct link to the latest invoice and have a “Pay Now” button if payment had failed on it, so the user can trigger retries manually
- Automatic retry a failed payment if the user updates their payment details
- Rewrite the subscription manager UI to use Vue.js and be a better/more reactive UI
- Allow removal of extras from the plan when upgrading to a higher tier
- Add option to gift a sub to someone
Here is the original plan for this that was in the roadmap, keeping it here for archival purposes. I think I managed to do most of what I had set out to do, so I’m happy about that!
Payment processing improvements
I know that after the Bazaar, the next task was going to be Assets Management, but I feel like this is a slightly more urgent thing to take care of, so I’ve bumped it to the top of the list. It’s also because it’s a rather simple and quick thing that I will do, whereas the Assets revamp task will be quite extensive and take a lot of my time before it’s ready.
If you’re wondering what this task is about… just checkout the current process needed in order to change your billing information and you’ll understand how badly needed it is.
What I basically want is these things :
- An area to change your billing information and payment methods
- A quick link to view your payment history and invoices
- Add Paypal support
- Add warning notifications on the site when your payment has failed so you can be aware of it (for those who don’t check their emails)
- Add a new Extra option to allow to increase the asset file size limit (so you can use UHD maps without having to upgrade your tier if you don’t want to)
- Allow plan upgrade with disabling extras (for those who don’t need the extra quotas anymore on a higher tier)
- Automate the locking/unlocking of accounts based on payment status
That last one is because at the moment, I need to check daily on who has failed to pay their subscription (due to credit card issue, insufficient funds, or blocked by bank while they verify the purchase is legitimate, etc…) and when a subscription has failed to be paid after multiple attempts, I need to lock the account (which usually results in the person finally noticing the emails I send and fix the problem), then once the invoice is paid, I need to be notified about it then manually unlock the account again. This takes time and is annoying, so it’s better if I make the website take care of that automatically, so it can free me up to do other things than handle these issues every day.