fundingpress – 1 month in and still failing

I bought this fundingpress theme/template over a month ago. Very impressed with the site building tutorials and online instructions provided by skywarrior themes. I like how the crowdfunding platform looks and feels similar to kickstarter. I love the backend and frontend editors of Visual Composer. I’ve been able to build exactly what I wanted. All in all, great experience building the site.

…But

Setting up the funding elements has been a dreadful experience for me. One month and counting, I still do not have a live crowdfunding site successfully working. Apparently I am not the only one because I see questions about this process on this fundingpress theme often. I even see that some users don’t setup PayPal on fundingpress because it’s such a headache. One of the problems I find is the instructions provided by skywarrior themes is incomplete, it’s outdated in some cases, and it fails to offer a general understanding of the process behind obtaining the infamous “Live PayPal Application ID”. I’ve called PayPal customer service at least ten times, each time asking the same thing – “What is my Application ID and where do I get it?” Some reps are clueless about the process, they default almost immediately to “You have to write our developers, they can be slow to respond, it could take 48hrs until you hear back.” A few PayPal reps have been more helpful, but only one was actually able to answer my question. This Application ID is something we have to apply for. It’s a process that you implement at paypal-apps.com. by creating a new app. I learned this by actually talking with one of the famed PayPal developers. Eventually I found the skyward themes instructions at the top of this forum, about how to fill this application out. What to put in what box, etc. (by the way I find it hard to believe that there is no search window for this fundingpress forum. Being able to search the more than 100 pages of fundinpress questions for other similar questions would be very helpful and probably reduce the number of new and duplicated questions) I found these Application instructions, again, to be missing some of the most key information; IE – the boxes you have to fill out in your own words, about the functionality that your site will require in order to work with your business model. Skyward themes leaves this wording up to you, with absolutely zero guidance or advice on what PayPal is actually asking for, considering any business model you might have in mind. They even say you’re on your own here. That’s not helpful at all.

So I did my best to fill this form out appropriately, interpreting the questions as best I could. PayPal says this application will take from 24-48hrs to get looked at and approved. It took 72hrs to get my first response, which was of course a request for more information.

TWELVE QUESTIONS of more information.

Questions like “will your campaigns be keep it all or all or nothing? What countries will you allow your users to collect funds from? Will there be rewards? If so, how much will those rewards be worth? Can you estimate what the average project funding goal will be? Will your customers have a maximum allowed donation per contributor? If so, what will it be? Will you have any limitations on campaign lengths? Will you be limiting the amount of projects a customer can create? Will a donator be able to fund a project more than once? What types of projects will be listed? How will you be vetting users? ..and then they went into things like chained payments, parallel payments, and on and on.

Was I somehow supposed to imagine (“you’re on your own here”) that these were the points I was supposed to fill in those empty boxes of my Application which skyward gives no advice about? Because I didn’t.

Suffice to say, simply following the skyward themes application instructions did not get me where I am trying to get – to the ever illusive “PayPal Application ID”. I am now 12 days from submitting my application and still have no definitive answer from PayPal.

…So, onto Stripe. I am one day into setting up Stripe on my fundingpress theme and so far Stripe is far easier, and vastly better described by Stripe itself than PayPal describes their own site. However Stripe setup on fundingpress is not described by skyward themes anywhere that I can find. No videos, no instructions. You will find plenty of Stripe setup videos for wordpress sites using woocommerce and the Stripe plugin, but using Stripe on fundingpress is vastly different, so unfortunately these videos are only partly appropriate. From all that I can tell, you don’t use the standard Stripe plugin the way you would if you were creating a woocommerce store, but instead you input your Stripe settings in the projects/funding of the fundingpress dashboard. Unfortunately using Stripe in fundingpress, rather than with woocommerce as a plugin, you simply get three boxes to fill out rather than a full page of settings and controls: Stripe Client ID, Stripe Secret Key, Stripe Publishing Key. The rest you have to setup on Stripe.com, which I have not yet been successful with, because again there are no instructions provided by skyward themes.

All of this will come with more time and more dedication but that’s my whole point here; this fundingpress theme would be a lot more successful for a lot more users if skyward themes provided better instructions for setting up funding, not just for paypal but for stripe and for wepay credentials as well.