01 — Client
About the project
Selling PDFs worldwide means calculating VAT by every buyer’s country. For the author of one book series that is impossible. The shop is built so that this task does not exist.
02 — Context
The task
The old site ran WooCommerce for the sake of one product. A cart, a checkout, a customer account and cart scripts on every page served a single PDF at fifteen euros.
The series is growing to twelve books, each with its own problem and its own age. The catalogue has to help a parent find the book for a specific fear rather than scroll a list.
Digital goods in the EU are taxed by the buyer’s country. The author works as a Kleinunternehmerin, and reporting across twenty-seven countries would have closed the shop before it opened.
03 — Solution
How it works
3.1
Merchant of Record instead of a payment gateway
Lemon Squeezy legally sells the book itself: it calculates and pays VAT by the buyer’s country, issues the invoice, handles refunds and stores purchases. The author receives a payout, not bookkeeping. The “Buy PDF” button leads straight to payment, and the file arrives by email.
3.2
No cart, no account
Books are bought one at a time; sets are sold as bundles. The customer area is “My Orders” at Lemon Squeezy: sign-in by a link from the email, repeat downloads. The site has no cart, checkout or account pages, and no code to serve them.
3.3
A custom “Books” post type
A full plugin, not a snippet. A book has a number in the series, a problem, an age, a price, a “coming soon” status, bullet points, a word from the author and spreads. The storefront has six filter groups by problem; the “parents with this problem also take” block is assembled automatically from shared categories. The free book leads to the lead-magnet page.
3.4
Instant loading
The shop adds not a single script to the page: only storefront styles and markup. No cart fragments, no jQuery, no requests to the payment service before the button is clicked. A book page loads like any regular page of the site.
3.5
Payment at a single point
The payment intermediary is attached by a single “Lemon Squeezy product” field on the post. If the service becomes unavailable or changes its terms, moving to Paddle, Polar or Gumroad means replacing twelve links. Content and structure stay untouched.
3.6
SEO and legal pages
Every book has its own JSON-LD Book with author, format and language; the SEO plugin’s stock schema for this type is switched off to avoid duplicates. The AGB, Widerruf and Datenschutz pages describe Lemon Squeezy as the seller and the withdrawal procedure for digital goods under § 356 (5) BGB.
04 — Outcome
Result
Twelve books in the catalogue, six problem groups, a “coming soon” status on the ones still being written, and not a line of shop JavaScript on the page. The author adds a book as a regular post and pastes in the product link.
VAT, invoices, refunds and purchase storage sit with the Merchant of Record. The site holds neither payment data nor customer accounts: nothing to protect and nothing to lose.