New cash register

• Apr 10, 2021 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

The PainScience.com online store has a new online store checkout and an updated system for processing orders. It’s a boring announcement, the virtual equivalent of telling you that I have a new cash register. But, if you were lucky enough to still have a favourite local bookshop, and it acquired a fancy new till, you’d probably have a friendly chat about it with the proprietor: “Oooh, get yourself a new till there, Jim?” “Sure did! It even takes Apple Pay. Want to buy a book with that shiny watch of yours? Now you can!”

Naturally it took a buttload of unusual effort to pull this together, like most small-business infrastructure upgrades. It hijacked my recent content development project, and I haven’t read or summarized a scientific paper in three weeks. Had to be done, though! Sometimes I have to step back from writing to upgrade the ecommerce stuff… or the business won’t be able to keep underwriting the writing!

Here’s what the new checkout looks like:

This is the new checkout, powered by Stripe, which is Very Nice Tech, as these days go. Beats the pants off PayPal, that’s for sure. So far people have been checking out in less than 90s, and sometimes as little as twenty seconds thanks to Apple Pay. That’s fast!

If you want to see the “new cash register” for yourself, zip over to my store or donation page, click any green buy button, wait slightly too long (I am not thrilled with the button speed, but it’s not terrible)… and behold. You can look without buying, of course.

And please let me know if anything seems wrong with it — that would actually be super helpful. That’s really what I’m asking here. Crowdsourced bug-hunting.

Behind the scenes: “If only I had procrastinated more”

Tragically and ironically, this project wouldn’t have even been necessary if not for some astonishingly bad timing in 2018. I take you behind the scenes on my personal blog: The new online store story (“If only I had procrastinated more”). Tales from the webmaster trenches! For the few subscribers who are keen on that sort of thing.