One piece of feedback we’ve received is that filling out the listing wizard is pretty easy but then, right when you think you’re done, you are greeted with a pop-up window that (a) comes as a surprise, and (b) demands that you complete a Stripe registration that can feel invasive—and takes more time.
To the first problem, there’s an obvious answer, which we will try to implement soon: Adding “Payment Settings” to the sidebar, so you know it’s coming.
To the second problem there is not much we can do. Amending the UX so that someone creating a listing page didn’t have to complete Stripe set-up until after they’d found a client or agreed to a gig would mean creating pages, workflows, and new email notifications to deal with the new scenarios that suddenly become possible.
For instance, say you were on EDITH looking for a cover designer, found someone you wanted to collaborate with, reached out to them and this designer was excited to work on your project and accepted your price offer. That would feel great (I hope). But then if you received a notification that this designer hadn’t completed their payment settings, so the work would be on hold until they did, you might feel less great. If this designer happened to have a particularly leisurely approach to administrative stuff, and it took them two weeks to get around to completing their payment settings, or if they somehow encountered a problem with their bank, you might get impatient.
And if their payment settings problem couldn’t be fixed, then the job would have to be canceled—and you’d need to start your designer search all over.
All this to say that the inconvenience of requiring that the Stripe set-up be dealt with right away is smaller than the potential inconvenience (and frustration) created by not requiring Stripe be dealt with right away. That’s the present thinking, in any event, and we welcome your input anytime. Thanks for reading this too-long post!
P.S. Stripe is a big, multinational payment processor much like PayPal, and a book publisher too. Stripe Press does really interesting work.