Now You Can Sell On Your Free WP.com Site

WordPress.com has made its monetisation features available for every site, including free sites.

Previously, WordPress.com site owners who wanted to generate revenue from their websites (by collecting donations, creating newsletters, or selling items or subscriptions) had to be on one of the paid plans.

Now, anyone – whether on a paid plan or a free plan- can do it.

Now anyone can add a PayPal button or a Stripe button to their WordPress site.

Simple Payment Buttons

This is a view of the admin panel on a draft post on a WP.com site. I entitled the post with the super creative title of ‘A Post’, and on the left of the page you can see the blocks you can add. The blocks shown are in the section named EARN – and you can see that I added the Pay with PayPal button and then the Stripe button in the post.

You can sell physical products of course. You can also sell digital products that the customer downloads. It could be an image, a leaflet, a mockup, a piece of art, anything – and you just have to figure out where to put the product so your customer can download it when they have paid for it.

There are limits to what you can do with buttons. There is no stock control and no way to mark a product out of stock. That might not matter. Maybe you are selling photographic prints, and when you see that stock is getting low you get more printed – so stock is never an issue.

You can’t offer size, colour, or any kind of variation with simple buy buttons. Well, you could if you presented each variation as a separate product and added a button for each variation..

For example,. if you offer say small, medium, and large T shirts in three colours – red, blue, and green, that’s nine variations. The only way to offer them is to make each variation a product and then you have to have nine decriptions and nine PayPal or Stripe buttons. You could do it, but it’s a bit clunky, 

And customers can’t buy a selection of different products in one order, because there is no basket. So if a customer wants to buy more than one thing, they have to complete a separate payment transaction for each product.

Again, you could bundle products in one transaction, but that is just another way of saying ‘this is one product’.

So there are limits to what you can do with these pay buttons, but for single product sales it is easy to add buttons – and now you can do it with any plan – paid or free.