A manual, not a course
From an empty folder to a live site taking real card payments — inside one working day. Twelve stages, in order, with the money path in the detail it actually needs and the traps that catch almost everyone.
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Why a manual
Ask an assistant for a payment page and you will have a working one in minutes, and it really will work when you try it yourself. The trouble starts with the cases you cannot easily try.
Both are told the last one is free. Both are charged. “Check, then save” finds this gap almost every time.
Providers retry webhooks. Delivered twice is fine. Delivered zero times, because you de-duplicated too early, is the bug.
Money goes back with none of your metadata attached. What you sold has to be un-sold, and nothing tells you unless you asked for it.
Charged, never returned to your site, never sent the thing. The return page cannot be what delivers; only the webhook can.
Every one of them ends the same way: somebody's card is charged and they get nothing. This manual is the list of things to ask for — and then to check you got.
One working day
Decide in the morning, build through the middle, ship in the afternoon. The one thing that moves early is the merchant review — it is the only part of going live you cannot speed up by working harder.
What's inside
What you need before you start. Do this — the work itself, numbered and in order. Watch out for — the traps, each one a way a real build fails.
You are not shipping the whole idea today; you are shipping its first complete path.
Buy it first — it is the decision most likely to eat two hours if you leave it until you are tired.
Build the new thing out of parts you have already got working before, even if they are unfashionable.
Numbered SQL files and a short script to apply them. Never check first and then save.
The page, the button, the thank-you. Resist making any of the three clever.
One legal-shaped decision that changes your tax situation. Ask to go live in your first hour.
The one place you slow down, because going faster here costs real money and real trust.
An email provider having a bad minute must never roll back a sale. Watch the daily cap.
Refunds, stuck payments, revoking access — decide how now, not at eleven at night.
A short stage, because the list is short. None of it is optional once money is involved.
Five separate systems that each have to be told about the others. In order.
Work down it in order. Nothing here is optional.
Read a sample
These are real “watch out for” boxes, word for word. There are eighteen of them, and each one is something that actually went wrong.
Stage 4 · DatabaseWatch out forNever check first and then save. Asking “is this still free?” and then saving a booking feels careful, and is not. Between those two moments there is a gap, and if two people are buying at the same second, both get told yes and both get charged. This is not bad luck; two simultaneous buyers find that gap almost every time. Let the database rule reject the second one, and treat being rejected as a normal thing your code expects and handles politely.
Stage 6 · The sellerWatch out forAsk to go live in your first hour, not your last. A provider that sells on your behalf reviews your account, and usually your product and website, before letting you take real money, and the review can take anything from hours to days. Create the account and submit whatever they ask for at the start of the day, then build in test mode while it runs. It is the one part of going live you cannot speed up by working harder.
Stage 7 · The money pathWatch out forNever trust a price the browser sends you. This is not only about getting sums right, it is about security: anything the browser sends can be changed by the person using it, including the price. Always work out the charge on your own server. Otherwise somebody is charged one amount and given something worth another, and they will notice before you do.
Stage 8 · EmailWatch out forWatch the daily cap, not just the monthly one. A common free tier allows a few thousand emails a month but only a hundred or so a day. At two emails per sale, a hundred a day is roughly fifty sales, which is fine for normal operation and not fine for the day you land on a front page. That is, of course, the only day it matters.
Rendered as they appear in the PDF. The full manual has one of these blocks at the end of nearly every stage.
Stage 7
Everything else in the manual is about going faster. This is the one place you slow down, because it is where going faster costs real money and real trust.
The browser never sets the price. Anything it sends can be changed by the person using it. The charge is decided on your server and confirmed by the provider, or somebody pays one amount and receives something worth another.
The webhook is the only thing that delivers. Not the thank-you page — it is reached before the money is known to have moved. The guide walks through signatures, retries, idempotency and reversals in the detail they actually need.
Not a theory
parkbid.lol — a paid directory drawn as a car park — was built this way, and is live and taking real card payments from real strangers. So was this site: one page, one product, one day, following the same twelve stages.
Every trap in the manual is one that turned up for real while doing it. The list on the right is not hypothetical.
Is it for you
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$10one-time · PDF · yours to keep
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Questions
A PDF of roughly 9,000 words, delivered as a download link by email. No login, no platform, no drip schedule. You can read it in an hour and work through it in a day.
No. It assumes you have an AI coding assistant that can (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, whichever you already pay for), and that you are willing to run the commands it hands you and read what comes back. Payments, webhooks, migrations and DNS are each explained the first time they appear.
It names a stack and says why each piece is there, because a manual that refuses to choose is not much use on a day you are trying to finish. The reasoning is separable from the choices; stage 3 is largely about how to make them yourself.
Yes. Same manual, same price, same author. This is its own home. Buying it twice gets you the same file, so please don't — and if you do by accident, one will be refunded.
Reply to the delivery email, or write to hello@howtoship.today from the address you paid with, and you will get a fresh link. There is no time limit on that.