How it fits together | JormunTL docs

The three ways a chapter can be paid for, and the order to switch them on so you never charge a reader for something that does not work yet.

Everything in this section lives under Monetization in the WordPress sidebar. The settings themselves are at Monetization ▸ Settings, which has three tabs, and the menu down the left of that screen is the same list as this section of the docs.

The three ways a reader gets in

A locked chapter can be opened three ways, and they are independent. You can run one, two or all three.

	The reader	You need
Coins	Buys coins once, spends them a chapter at a time	A payment gateway and coin packages
Patreon	Pays monthly on Patreon, every locked chapter opens	A Patreon app
Waiting	Waits, and the chapter unlocks itself	Nothing. Set it in chapter access

Waiting is the one people forget. A chapter set to unlock after seven days is still a paid chapter to everybody who does not want to wait, and it costs you no setup at all. Many sites run only that.

The order to switch things on

The order matters, because two of these steps take a reader’s money and the others do not. Do the ones that cannot go wrong first.

Name your currency. Pick the icon, and the name follows it. Nothing charges anybody yet.
Decide what is locked. Choose whether new chapters are free, stay paid for a while, or stay paid until you say otherwise. Your site now has a paywall that only unlocks by waiting.
Set your prices. Six packages, entered in cents.
Turn on one gateway in test mode. Stripe is the usual first one. Buy a package from your own site with a test card and watch the coins arrive.
Switch that gateway to live keys, and buy one small package with a real card. Refund it in the gateway’s own dashboard afterwards.
Add Patreon, if you use it. This is last because it is the longest, and because it is the only part that depends on somebody else’s account being set up correctly.

Do not skip step 4. A gateway with the wrong webhook takes the money and never delivers the coins, and the first person to find out should be you.

What a reader ends up seeing

Two screens carry all of it: the locked chapter and the wallet. Both are covered in what readers see, including the eight different things the wallet says depending on the state of somebody’s Patreon membership.

What is not here

Refunds. There is no refund button, deliberately. A refund is a money movement, and money movements belong in the dashboard of whoever moved the money: Stripe, PayPal or Ko-fi. Refund there, then adjust the reader’s balance by hand on the Readers screen if you need to.

Subscriptions of your own. JormunTL does not sell recurring memberships itself. Patreon is the recurring option.