402 – Exploring eCommerce payment solutions with Aaron Bowie

Interview with Aaron Bowie and Nathan Wrigley.

Today, I’m joined by Aaron Bowie, a seasoned WordPress developer based in Aberdeen, Scotland. We’re here to explore the complexities of e-commerce payment solutions within WooCommerce. These are all solutions that he’s built, and I’m guessing that many of you will not have heard of, or even considered before. Honestly, they’re well worth a look.

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With over 15 years of experience in WordPress development and a decade dedicated to plugin creation, Aaron offers insights into the in’s and out’s of integrating various payment gateways.

The discussion begins with a comparison of Barclaycard’s payment options, emphasising the distinctions between the $169 onsite processing solution and the $79 offsite redirection alternative. Aaron talks about the security, and customer reassurance, offered by the onsite option despite its higher cost.

This theme of security is further expanded upon with an examination of PCI compliance requirements, detailing the many security audits and background checks provided by traditional gateways to prevent sudden account closures – a contrast to the more lenient, but potentially riskier, options like Stripe and PayPal.



Aaron also gets into the integration challenges and support mechanisms available, including setup videos and comprehensive documentation designed to facilitate the onboarding process for all users, from novices to experts. He highlights the responsiveness of his team to customer feedback, leading to the development of new plugins tailored to specific merchant needs, which fosters brand loyalty and user satisfaction.


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Towards the end we talk about the financial implications of using direct bank connections versus intermediary services like Stripe, noting the potential cost savings and increased control over transactions. Aaron mentions the commitment of his company to customer support and the ethical stance of not taking cuts from transactions, thereby maintaining impartiality and trust.

Have a listen and drop in a comment below…

Mentioned in this podcast:

weareag.co.uk


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[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 402, entitled exploring e-commerce payment solutions with Aaron Bowie. It was published on Thursday, the 12th of December, 2024.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we get stuck into the main event, a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay. What have we got for you today?

Well, this is really interesting. A little while ago, I came across some WooCommerce payment plugins from a provider that I had never heard of. And you're going to hear from Aaron Bowie, who is the developer, the architect, of all of these today on the podcast.

Now, before you say, well, I don't need to listen to this, I've got my WooCommerce site sorted, and all my payment gateways are set up and running. This is a little bit different. Aaron has taken on the responsibility of working directly with banks, and because of the connection directly with banks, you can typically have much lower fees. I know that most people are probably using things like PayPal and Stripe.

Well, this is just completely different to that. You have more responsibility, because you are connecting directly with a bank, but as I said, you have significantly lower fees. And Aaron talks about how it all works. What kind of banks you can use, and where you can find the plugins themselves.

I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Aaron Bowie.

How are you doing, Aaron?

[00:04:01] Aaron Bowie: Not bad. Not bad.

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. Nice to, nice to speak to you Aaron and I have had about five minutes chatting before we hit record. And Aaron is in the UK but he is in a different part of the uk. He's in Scotland in Aberdeen. How's it up there? Enjoying life in Aberdeen.

[00:04:17] Aaron Bowie: the coming.

[00:04:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, it sounds like Game of Thrones. It really is literally coming though. we've got Aaron on the podcast today because I saw a tweet from Andrew Palmer. So if Andrew Palmer's listening to this, I hope you, I, hope you, you feel proud of yourself. I saw a tweet in which Andrew mentioned, Aaron's plugins, which we'll get onto in just a moment.

And if you're into. I don't know, selling things online, e-commerce. Then this could be a real moment for you. There'll be a whole bunch of stuff in here that might be of interest. 'cause it's all about payment gateways and getting funds through e-commerce and WooCommerce and that kind of thing. But before we do that, Aaron, do you just wanna give us like honestly as much or as little as you, just a little potted bio about you, what you do, what kind of work you've been involved in WordPress, and anything you like really that touches just on who you are.

[00:05:10] Aaron Bowie: I've been building with WordPress, must be 15 plus years now.

Been a while, I moved over to selling plugins because I had a freelance client who was having an issue with a payment gateway. And it snowballed from that. I come to an agreement where, with the client where I could package this new plugin up and sell it on my site.

and it was just a way for seeing if I could change my business and go in that direction. and it's been nearly 10 years now doing that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still do the client work or is it, are you just focused on

[00:05:51] Aaron Bowie: Not anymore.

[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: now?

[00:05:53] Aaron Bowie: It's just full time on the plugins. It has been for a little while now as well.

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. so right now I'll just get you to pause the podcast, dear listener and, go to Aaron's website. It's, we are a GI guess that's how you would say it out loud. Yeah. we are ag, so W-E-A-R-E-A-G co uk.

As, always, if you go to wp builds com and search for this episode. Then the links for everything that we talk about that I can remember. We'll be in the show notes. So we are ag, what's the Ag bit?

[00:06:30] Aaron Bowie: so it, it means something different from

what it did back then,

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:06:35] Aaron Bowie: a track to bt and it'll come up with some amazing stuff.

[00:06:38] Nathan Wrigley: okay, Is it a name that you are settled with that? It would be better to have a different name at this point.

[00:06:46] Aaron Bowie: we rebranded and then it just stuck and I just didn't wanna change it again.

[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: I guess not. so if you go to, we are ag.com. The bit that I ended up looking at was the plugins section. So if you go to the homepage, you'll see, as it is at the moment, the, the strap line says, WooCommerce, payment gateways, payment processing solutions for WooCommerce that you can trust.

Our plugins offer seamless integration and exceptional support. And then if you click on the C plugins, there's absolute, there's loads. What have we got? Nine, 12. It's up 14, I think at the minute.

[00:07:20] Aaron Bowie: 14. Yeah, there's probably about 20 that I've built over the years.

[00:07:23] Nathan Wrigley: And, and so it's all utterly focused on payment solutions. And so typically when you hear people talk about an e-commerce site, WooCommerce in particular, in this case is the most popular choice in, the.

the WordPress space, people always tend to go with the default, let's just use Stripe because everybody knows Stripe and you get Stripe set up and running in 15 minutes or what have you. Or I guess PayPal's a bit of a holdout, but it does feel as if there are some sort of movers and shakers in the payment space.

Things like Molly come to mind and a few others. But you have been doing this for absolute ages. What is it that you do differently? What are the plugins that you've got and. Just give us your overall kind of broad pitch of what you do, and then we'll dig into the weeds.

[00:08:14] Aaron Bowie: so a majority of our plugins that we saw are what we would call a traditional payment gateway. unlike Stripe or PayPal, where it's super easy to get set up with an account, when you are setting up an account with, let's say Barclays, for instance, you would have to go through legal background checks.

before you could actually get an account with them. you've probably seen on Reddit people saying that their accounts have been closed because of this, when they're using Stripe. And it's because later on, after their accounts being active for a bit, they've run it through their checks that they need to do, and then they've decided that they're in breach of terms conditions, so they've closed their account.

This happens before. Someone get an account with a additional payment gateway, so there's less chances of that sort of thing happening.

[00:09:08] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Okay. So, in effect what you're saying then Stripe offload the checks and balances, the, legal bit, for want of a better word.

[00:09:18] Aaron Bowie: I imagine they did. They do some, but don't hold me to it. I've not really done much with Stripe or PayPal. I.

[00:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but I.

[00:09:30] Aaron Bowie: The more

[00:09:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the fact that they can close you down at a later date because, some of the things that you've done, whereas the.

[00:09:36] Aaron Bowie: it could just be a case of the stuff

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. exactly right. you may be selling something that doesn't agree with, I don't know, policy or what have you. And I've definitely heard of that.

I've heard of people, especially on the PayPal side. I think PayPal certainly used to, I dunno if it's still the case, but it used to have a bad rep of just people literally waking up one morning to realize that their PayPal account had been closed upon them and they couldn't access funds and it was very difficult to get back.

But I do remember back in the day, I used to work with, Magento websites quite a lot. and payment gateways back then before, so PayPal was around, but I don't think it was the incumbent it is now. I don't think it was quite so widely used, but there were things like Sage Pay I used quite a bit, and these were, I.

Really ity to set up. There was a lot of legwork to be done. even things like getting an SSL back then was a bit of a pain in the neck and you had to go through some sort of, SSL house that you could buy them from and upload all of the different bits and pieces to the server correctly and all of that.

But I do remember that the banking piece was particularly hard. but I never knew that was the case, that it was, because there were lots of checks and balances. So is it the case then that, If I'm just on your website, I can see that you're using, and in the UK some of these names might be really familiar.

if you're in different parts of the world. I'm not sure how these names transfer, but there's things like Lloyd's, L-L-O-Y-D-S is a great big bank. there's Barclays sparkly card. There's other ones like, world Line, there's, in fact, it looks like there's a variety of different ways that you can pay with Barclay card.

We'll get into that. NatWest, what else have we got? And, various others. Some of them I've never heard of before. so is it that your plugin enables you to skip all of the checks and balances, or does it, does somebody still need to do it, but you just take care of the linking WooCommerce to the bank so that you can get directly paid?

[00:11:36] Aaron Bowie: Yeah, we, basically help the integration between the website and the account that they've got with the payment provider they've selected. They still need to go through all the checks and stuff. I think for most of the providers, the checks are like a couple of weeks. so you can't really buy a plugin from us off on the whim.

You need to know that you've got an account in place.

with the

[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the, let's say for example with Barclays or something like that, Barclay card. the, way we would have to do it if we wanted to use your plugins, we'd have to first of all have an account. That account would have to be in good standing, and then we would have to make sure that our account wasn't in breach of any of the bits and pieces that might allow us to do e-commerce through Barclays.

And then once that's in place, then we would come to you and buy the plugin. do you just, curiously, do you offer some sort of, I don't know, money back guarantee? do you offer like a

in which that kind of due diligence could fail and therefore you'd offer a refund or,

[00:12:43] Aaron Bowie: yeah. I'm not gonna hold people's money ransom.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So, what, why then, wouldn't you just say everybody use Stripe, or everybody use PayPal? I know that those accounts can be shot and what have you, but is there a financial benefit for using

[00:13:02] Aaron Bowie: For a traditional gateway. yeah, a hundred percent. The, fees can be a lot cheaper with some providers. but then some providers will also offer other services like, car terminals. So if you've got brick and mortar shop, you can have your car terminal and your online shop using the same infrastructure, which I know make life so much easier for doing your accounts

[00:13:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the fees are lower, I think, everybody knows about the PayPal. Sorry, the, sort of, let's take Stripe. 'cause that seems to be the example, which most people would recognize. The last time I looked, I think it was either 2.9 or 2.4% plus 20 I. Pence or US cents or whatever. So there's, every time you do a transaction, there is a fee, and obviously the bigger the transaction, the more dollars or pounds that transaction becomes that you're paying to stripe.

How would that compare to, gi give us a really favorable example if you can summon one up. Can you think of any, one of the banks that you might interact with where they give you a really good rate?

[00:14:07] Aaron Bowie: so NatWest pretty well by NatWest. this is probably a little bit old data, but they did tell us, that a 25 pound transaction using Stripe was gonna be like 55 p. It would've cost a merchant. Whereas if you are using their, infrastructure, it works out to be like 30, 40. So it's, but then you're doing this over the course of a year, multiple transactions per day, it a.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: I, I know when you say it like that, you think, okay, it's, yeah, but, you know what? Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves as my mother, Houston. Tell me. But if you've got a, if you've got a store, and obviously now you can throw in the bricks and mortar piece, you can sell the stuff with the terminal, what have you if you do a thousand transactions a day, multiply a thousand by 20 pence, that's, decent money.

And you are literally giving it away for the convenience of just using the default. And I'm using air quotes when I say the

[00:15:08] Aaron Bowie: Yeah.

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: so it has, so it's not like there's no fees involved, but there are. Less fees involved. And, where do you, as a plugin developer sit in all of that? do you have, do you like, get, a slice of that pie in any way?

It's,

and is that different, do you, stand out as a sort of different character there? Do most plugins that offer some kind of functionality like yours, do they typically, I don't know, add on 1% or something like that?

[00:15:41] Aaron Bowie: Possibly, but there could be also other deals being done as well. I've made a stand that we will not accept anything. We might do a deal with a payment provider to offer the plugin at a lower cost, but we wouldn't do anything to muddy the waters so that we. We'd be more inclined to push one plug plugin over another.

I want to be independent. we will point people to plugins that they can do some investigation work to see what fits them, but we're not gonna tell 'em, you need to use this one

[00:16:17] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:16:18] Aaron Bowie: just because we're gonna get something back

[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so your offer's pretty clear. There is no hidden amount that's going to you, what you are paying is you pay the fee for the plugin, which we'll get onto in a minute. and then after that, every, slice that's taken out is going. Directly to the bank. and obviously, you're gonna get into that with your eyes open and what have you.

It's interesting. If you go onto the plugins page on Aaron's website, you can see them all. And I'll just go through a few just to give you some idea of the cost and you can tell me whether these are an annual thing or if it's a one-time fee or what have you. So you do have a stripe for WooCommerce, Stripe checkout for WooCommerce.

And that one is, it says $35. Is that like an annual thing? Are each of these annual Okay.

[00:17:03] Aaron Bowie: all of them are

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: So everything I'm about to say is annual. Then Barclay card, I think is the most expensive one, is $169. What? What? Why that? Why is that much more than all the others?

[00:17:15] Aaron Bowie: The reason why this one's more expensive is back in the early days, we had, as you can see, we've got two for Barclays. the lower rate one is that because the customer's redirected to Barclays service to process the payments, the PCR compliance level for that is much lower, the 160 plus plugin.

For Belays is taking payments directly on the website. And with this, the merchant needs to think about the higher level of PCR compliance. And this was a way for us to separate the two. because if you are using a direct payment option, but you're not PCR compliant, then there's a high risk that the payment provider's gonna shut your count down 'cause you're not PCR compliant and

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: Can you just part, can you just break apart what that acronym is? What would that mean? PCI.

[00:18:10] Aaron Bowie: Payment industry

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Payment card

[00:18:13] Aaron Bowie: me. I can't remember. Yeah.

that's So,

it's like a set of rules that you need to abide by. most offsite ones are super simple and it's literally just a questionnaire that you would literally fill in. And then just making sure that the website's on a PC compliance server.

And all your plugins, all the software that's running on the software is up to date. with the Direct one, because car payments are being taken directly on the site, there's a risk that someone could get in the middle of it. so with a high PCR compliance, they normally want you to have someone to come in and do an audit of the website to make sure that it's all

[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: We have a whole variety of listeners to this podcast, and some of them are highly technical and some of them are just beginning on any kind of website building journey. And so I'll just break that apart a little bit. So the, more affordable one, so there's two Barclay guards. One, one is 1 6 9 and one is 79.

So you can see roughly almost twice the amount for the, one that's, Slightly different if you, use the cheaper one, when you go through the checkout process, you are literally the website is being redirected. You're gonna head over to Barclay card. They take on the responsibility of the PCI compliance there, and then presumably there's some handshake.

That data is then passed and you come back to your WooCommerce store and I don't know, you get the invoice and it's all logged in WooCommerce where, so that's That's nice, but it is a little bit discombobulating, isn't it? When you see that happening, there is that moment of what, what's going on?

Why am I, why does this not look like it did a minute ago? that kind of thing. So for the 170, the $169, you are wrapping Barclay card up in your own website. Everything's happening on your website, so there's none of that. It's just all going on there. And so you can, I don't know, you just in some small psychological way, it just feels a little bit more reassuring, but there's a lot more going on in the background to make sure that works.

Okay. okay, so then what else have we got? We've got trust payments that I confess, that's not one I've heard of before. 79 Lloyd's. 79. Ingenico not heard of them before. 79. ortho pay. They're all 79, unless I say otherwise. Let's go with that. TYL till, I dunno, by NatWest. and then we've got World Line Online payments for WooCommerce.

That one's the cheapest at 25. Barclay Card Smart Pay Fuse. That's 59 CyberSource. 59 First Data Connect, 79 a CI Op Open Payment Platform. Ooh, that's interesting. Open Payment platform and oeo, the 79 and 59 respectively. Honestly, go and check out. Go and check out Aaron's website. We are ag.co uk slash plugins.

Now, gotta ask. Apart from the fact that, it would be extremely difficult to build these, do you yourself have to undergo some sort of PCI compliance check? in other words, if we buy your plugins, can we offset that, that legal responsibility for want of a better word over to you? Or is it just caviar mTOR?

What you give us is what we get and you've still gotta do all of the due diligence. How does that bit work?

[00:21:35] Aaron Bowie: so most of the payment providers will help with running through the PCR compliance. Some of the payment providers, when we've released them, we've shared the plugin files with them, for them to basically approve, to run through that they're happy. and I've used like Tim Nash before to do an audit on plugins before.

obviously security's a big thing. and the takeaways that I got from Tim were, second to none. They really did help us in the early days.

[00:22:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so there's still may because we use your payment gateway, we still, your payment gateway plugin I should say. there's still need to be careful, need to be mindful, it's not a set it and forget it kind of thing. Carry out the regular updates, make sure that the bank know what you're doing.

All of those kind of things still apply. It's not okay, this

[00:22:34] Aaron Bowie: They, will check in with you every now and then as well, just to make sure that everything's okay, to make sure that everything's up to date.

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: sticking with the, Barclays one, 'cause we mentioned it a moment ago. What does the process of setting that up look like? Because if we're, if we, literally, if I, if I'd never done e-commerce before in the time it's taken for us to have this conversation, I could have set up a Stripe account.

I. I could have installed WooCommerce, I could have linked the necessary, API, private and secret keys, sorry, secret and public keys into the Stripe payment gateway option for WooCommerce. I could be selling stuff by now. Basically. This, I'm guessing is a little bit more difficult. How do I bind Barclay card or whatever it may be into the plugin?

Is it a, similar thing like API keys go copied and pasted from one place to another?

[00:23:27] Aaron Bowie: So the Barclays one's a little bit more in depth than some of the other ones that we've got. we recommend, we say that it should take no more than 20

[00:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Okay.

[00:23:38] Aaron Bowie: we've got setup videos that walk you through the whole setup process. We've got. full on documentation set up Wizard, double you through it.

there's a few things that need to be done to the account side to make it link up to the plugin correctly. and it, when Barclays was the first plugin that I was selling, so that one is like my baby. it's 10 years old now. and in the early days we didn't really have much documentation.

I. and a few years back we heavily pushed on documentation to try and simplify everything, make it easier because we noticed that people were having problems onboarding with the plugin. So we wanted to try and make it as easy as possible.

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's also quite a, quite an anxious thing as well, isn't it? L like

less so now I think. But back in the day when you launched that plugin, I reckon there must have been a thousand ways you could do. Integrations with, basically e-commerce. There were a thousand ways you could go wrong. And nowadays with things like Stripe where you just copy and paste a key and that's you and link a bank account on the other end, it's like super drop dead simple.

But it, but there's a lot going on in the background, isn't it? And I do think it's quite an anxious moment. if you don't want anything to go wrong. You're selling stuff online, you're giving people goods, you don't want. To come between you and being successfully paid and all of that. So it is important to onboard people properly, I

[00:25:10] Aaron Bowie: A hundred percent.

[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:12] Aaron Bowie: A hundred percent. That's been like our motto is to try and make it as easy as possible. if, after watching the videos or the documentation or the wizard and they're still having issues, then you know, we're on hand to help and guide and get, it all up and running.

Then.

[00:25:30] Nathan Wrigley: Do you, do you take notice of what people ask for? So we've obviously gone through the. The list of the ones that you've got so far and curiously, like I said, some of them I'd never heard of before. So there, there may be like, I don't know, different parts of the world or maybe it's just that I don't really get myself into e-commerce all that much, so I don't really know.

are you always looking out for new options that you can add to your suite or is this, are you happy with what you've got?

[00:25:56] Aaron Bowie: No, it is changed a lot over the years. what normally happens is, we'll have a merchant say to us that, they're gonna be moving away from this plugin or this provider and they're looking to go to this provider. we've had that a few times and then we've basically built out a plugin for that provider and then manage to keep hold of that merchant.

and some of them have been really well for us. Because of that, we would've never heard of them before.

[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: When.

[00:26:26] Aaron Bowie: yeah, we're always listening.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: that's nice. So I, was thinking, if you've got a particular bank that you want to stick with through thick and thin, then a Aaron's your man, go and,

[00:26:36] Aaron Bowie: Brand loyalty is always there, especially with the, payment there is.

[00:26:41] Nathan Wrigley: when you get paid in Stripe or something else, usually there's this period, I, don't even know what the period is for, to be honest, but Stripe hold onto your money for a period of days, and I know that amount of mo, that amount of time decreases as your account, reaches certain milestones.

So I presume, either financial. Amounts that's gone through that account, or maybe it's just time, I think it drops down to three days or seven or one day or something like that. The point, but the point is the money never arrives right away. You you, get paid for the object, the thing that you're selling online, and then you wait a while and, Hope that Stripe pay you the right amount, which I'm sure they mostly do, is because you are binding your e-commerce platform to a bank, is that different? Does the money land in your bank account immediately or is it the same deal where they'll hold it in some kind of, I don't know, escrow or, yeah.

[00:27:35] Aaron Bowie: yeah.

[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: and so that's the same,

[00:27:39] Aaron Bowie: This is, I think it's mostly just to protect against, chargebacks or refunds or, for money laundering as well. they'll need to do checks

[00:27:48] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But, what you, the, number that you receive, is gonna be, 48 hours seems. Seems quite short in all honesty. I'm sure that it's a lot longer than that with Stripe to begin with. So that does seem like a fairly short amount of time. And can you carry out, typically with these kind of banks, Barclays, and so on, can you carry out international transactions or are you bound only to the currency that you are living in?

So in our case, pounds, or can you do transactions in dollars and Australian dollars or Canadian dollars, whatever it may be.

[00:28:25] Aaron Bowie: Yeah, some providers have different ways of doing this. They, some would open up a second account for you, which would then be for your multicurrency. This account would then need to be all set up and then linked to the plugin. and we support that. Others would just allow you just to add whatever currencies that you want on your account.

it just really depends on the

[00:28:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and if I was to come to you and I was, I'd only been using say, Stripe, and I was linking that to my regular bank account. Is there one of these that you would Recommend that I look at. Is there a way of figuring out, this one's gonna work better for me? Or do you just work on the basis of, look, that's your job, you figure that stuff out, or can you help with that?

if you've got this kind of a store or this kind of turnover, then this one might be a good idea. In other words, what separates them? Why would I go for Barclays over Lloyd's or Lloyd's over Barclay's, or Ingenico over Lloyd's, or whatever it may be.

[00:29:23] Aaron Bowie: Most of the time it's gonna be down to the transaction fees, but there are cases where it will be for features. some, will have features that you want, some won't. if, it's very rare that we get people asking us who would we recommend? but we would just send 'em up, a list of a few just to look at.

it is, it's not done for us to tell you who you

[00:29:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I'm guessing that most of your traffic then comes from people who are out and have a bank account and have done like a Google search for, I don't know, WooCommerce, Lloyd's, and they come up with. Your website because that's exactly what you do. So they're looking to connect something without this third party in the middle.

'cause that, that basically seems like what you're doing. if you're banking with Lloyds and you can't use Stripe as a bank, so it Stripe is just that go-between, isn't it? it's that facilitator of the transaction from online through to your bank account with processing on the ways for a small fee.

and what you are basically providing is some functionality to just get rid of that middleman. You're gonna pay the bank fees only, so it'll be lesser and you only have one person to deal with. You don't have to worry about Stripe or them closing that account because it's just a direct connection between you and your bank.

have I summed that up about right? Is that kind of what you're doing? Mostly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. in which case, I'm gonna mention the URL one more time. It is, we are ag.co uk. If you've got any different thoughts about this and you wanna just check it out, there's obviously that, do you have an email address or like a social handle that you hang out on where people could find you if they've been intrigued?

[00:31:14] Aaron Bowie: I am on Twitter a little bit.

[00:31:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think everybody's on Twitter a little bit these days.

[00:31:22] Aaron Bowie: yeah, it's, AG Aaron Bowie. Is my personal

[00:31:27] Nathan Wrigley: and we'll link to that into the show notes as well. And I'm just gonna see if there is a contact form on your website. Don't know.

[00:31:34] Aaron Bowie: There's a.

[00:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. Yeah, I got it. I see. So at the top on the, on the main menu, there's a support, there's a support button which you can click and yeah, go check it out. So there you go.

We are ag. Go and check out all the different ways that you can, you can bind your bank account to your WooCommerce store. And honestly, I reckon most people are just using. The defaults, the stripes, and the PayPals 'cause it's just, I didn't even know your stuff existed. I honestly, I didn't know it was possible to do what you do, so that's nice that you can cut out that middleman.

[00:32:05] Aaron Bowie: talking to some merchants, I think what normally happens is they set up an e-commerce website. They get set up with pa PayPal, Stripe, and once they get, their sales are at a certain level, they're like, yeah, we really need to start saving a little bit of money. And they start to look at the other options that are

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so that's an interesting way of looking at it. the sort of typical start of a e-commerce WooCommerce journey is just use the, in quotes, defaults because they're just there and they're dead easy to set up. And then if your business has been, if you've, if you a year in and you're making some revenue, then why wouldn't you make some more revenue by buying a, plugin for a, under a hundred bucks in most cases.

That'll allow you to shave off 20 cents, 20 pence here, there, and everywhere. And, it'll pay for itself pretty quickly. In all honesty, won't it? so there we go. There's the plugins. You've now found out about all of the different things that, Aaron's plugins can do. Go check out the website. And, Aaron, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

I appreciate it.

[00:33:06] Aaron Bowie: Thank you for having me.

[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all I've got for you today. Thank you for listening. Really appreciate that.

If you have any commentary on the podcast, head to WP Builds.com. Use the search to search for episode number 402. And we'd love it if you left us a comment there.

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We'll be back also on Thursday for a podcast. Head over to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe to keep updated. But I'm going to fade in some cheesy music, and say, stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.

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Nathan Wrigley
Nathan Wrigley

Nathan writes posts and creates audio about WordPress on WP Builds and WP Tavern. He can also be found in the WP Builds Facebook group, and on Mastodon at wpbuilds.social. Feel free to donate to WP Builds to keep the lights on as well!

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