Solamar had been using the same clunky system to handle our payment processing for a loooooooong time now, which involved an imperfect marriage between powerpay.biz and auth.net. It was the system we set up at the very beginning, back when we first launched this ol’ ship called Solamar, and since it worked and we were grandfathered into plans that had no limits there wasn’t a very compelling reason to switch…at least for a while.
We’d been hearing a LOT of things about Stripe, a powerful, feature-rich yet easy-to-use payment processor that has been making a lot of waves in the media lately. The more we looked at the modern environment and functionality they were offering, especially compared to what we were already using, making the switch seemed more and more attractive.
We finally decided to take the plunge when we realized that if we switched to Stripe, we could consolidate our payment services from two down to one, since Stripe handles all of the things we used to use both powerpay.biz and auth.net for. It saves us all the time we used to have to spend balancing those two systems, and that was an offer too good to pass up.
Still a little worried, we signed up for Stripe but left our accounts at the legacy services open, just in case. In the proceeding months, we discovered that Stripe is, in the words of our Founder and CEO Chelsea Berler, “A-FREAKIN-MAZING!” It’s user-interface is super friendly, and yet it can handle almost anything we throw at it. So last month, we closed our powerpay.biz and auth.net accounts completely, and exclusively use Stripe.
Stick around, and I’ll give you some details on Stripe and what it can do. Continue reading
Whether you’re taking a new website live or just posting your latest blog post, chances are you’re under a deadline and in a hurry to get across the finish-line. You’re excited to show off your latest creation, and ready to move on to the next thing in your queue, so you finish up, give it all a quick glance, and then take it live!
Here at Solamar, we just finished a big switch from Infusionsoft to Mailchimp for all of our online forms / email management. While Infusionsoft is great, we just didn’t need that powerful of a system for what we were trying to accomplish with it, and Mailchimp is our total fave if you don’t need all of the power that Infusionsoft offers.
One of the reasons we love WordPress so much is the vast number of plugins it has available to extend the built-in functionality. But since there are over 40,000 plugins available in the repository, we thought it would be fun to help you sort through the pile by recommending a few of our favorites. These will be plugins we use all the time, have thoroughly tested and highly suggest using if you are looking for what they offer.
If you’re like many clients who come to us, you’ve got a great idea for a program, course or product and you want to launch it online. You’ve seen many other entrepreneurs launch their thing, you’ve heard countless success stories, and launching looks like your ticket to finally making big bucks online without trading hours for dollars around the clock.
Want to grow your business and close more sales using online marketing? First, you need to attract more prospects and generate quality leads.
For many, many years now, Solamar has relied on the project management service Basecamp to manage our team and all of our projects, but recently we’ve begun to run up against the limitations of Basecamp’s offerings. 
