Not much progress on the Mac version of SmartGo One these last few weeks, thanks to the European Union. The EU now requires sales tax on go book sales, so I had to upgrade the integration of the gobooks.com backend with Stripe. Stripe’s newest checkout page handles collection of the appropriate taxes; I still get to do the fun part of submitting them. At least the EU lets you pay to a single country (I chose Ireland, so the forms are all in English), and they distribute from there.
So I’ve been working with PHP, MySQL, and webhooks, not my favorite activity, nor my area of expertise. At least I didn’t ship the bug where it sent you a free copy of SmartGo for Windows with every book purchase – I found that one before it went into production. Everything now seems to work well, but who knows what I messed up. Definitely needs more real-world testing.
The new checkout page not only deals with taxes, but also allows other payment options, like Apple Pay. And discounts now work. So to encourage you to buy those books you’ve long had your eye on, use coupon MINUS20 for 20% off any books at gobooks.com (also works for SmartGo for Windows).
This 20% discount is valid through Monday March 6. It’s the first discount in the 12 years of Go Books, so please grab this opportunity. (Note that royalties to authors and publishers are always based on the regular price, so they get their full payment.)
More improvements to gobooks.com (e.g. a shopping cart so you can buy multiple books at once, or complete a series) will have to wait for next year. Back to working on SmartGo One for the Mac.
smartgo.blog 