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Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?
As a single developer that has only given "online payments" a cursory glance the whole dance of gateways, merchant accounts and front-end recurring management platforms like Chargify or Recurly make my head spin.
I'm not the biggest fan of PayPal (reading enough horror stories over the last decade tends to cool you on some companies), but if it's the best option out there I'll use it.
I'm curious what the other single-person startups or small team startups that don't have the expertise to do full integrations with authorize.net/Braintree/etc. are doing to collect recurring/subscription payments?
I am hoping I'm missing some amazingly simple "all in one" company out there where a user can just enter credit card details and be done. I'm avoiding Amazon Payments and Google Checkout because of the required "create an account" step that a few companies have blogged about mucking up their follow-through with new customers.
Any tips would be much appreciated.
Links for reference (for anyone else in this boat)
Intuit's full solution:
http://payments.intuit.com/products/online-credit-card-processing.jsp
PayPal's full solution:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-pro-overview
BrainTree's full solution:
http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/recurring-billing
If anyone is using any of these successfully for subscription-based payments I'd love to hear about it. I spoke with someone at Recurly who (fairly?) pointed out that subscription management isn't the primary feature of any of these services, so some of the implementations are awkward; on that note I'm not ready (since I have little idea of how this business will do) to purchase more management layers like Recurly into my billing process until business picks up.
- zackattack 16y agoassuming you already have a merchant account and gateway (which takes like a day to get approved, assuming you don't have your social security card on hand)... you can get integrated with Recurly in two days of intense concentration. but if you just want to start taking customers' cash ASAP, you can do that with a paypal hosted button in about 5 minutes. WPP lets you accept credit cards w/ paypal - no paypal acct necessary - and there's tons of sample code out there that's basically copy and pasteable, and lots of code monkeys are familiar with the intricacies of paypal integration.
- portman 16y ago>> which takes like a day to get approved Which bank did you use? My experience has been that if you're doing ANYTHING other than e-commerce, it's a long uphill struggle. I've tried Chase, B of A, and Wachovia.
- zackattack 16y agocitibank business account
- MadQA 16y agoTake a look at 2checkout, they have some recurrent billing functionality out-of-box.
- salsakran 16y agoI'm using Paypal Pro payments + Recurly. Between the ease of opening an account and ease of integration it made the slightly higher charges well worth it. Recurly doesn't have drop in django integration, but I'll eventually clean up and open source the subscription/registration app I'm using.
- jaddison 16y agoI'd be interested in your open-source Django app. Sounds like a great idea.
- Mizza 16y agoI too would be very interested in seeing your Django app!
- IgorPartola 16y agoI am doing something similar with Spreedly. There is a Django app for it, but the API code is pretty messy (what do you imagine get_info() does?) If anyone is interested, I can post my API wrapper to github.
- thankuz 16y agoMight want to check out: Chargify, Spreedly or Recurly I also read a great post on setting up payments the right way, on the cheap, but I can't find it now. Will post if I do. One nice thing about PayPal is you can use them for Offline, Web and Mobile payments - there are pros and cons to consider, might want to contact a few companies and explain your needs.
- base 16y agomost of the payment gateway integrations can be done in 1 or 2 days. For the main ones like authorize.net/braintree/etc, you have tones of libraries and snippets all over the web. check activemerchant if you use ruby.
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoBeen very happy with Chargify, except that it's expensive, especially at the start. However, it's scaled incredibly well with us. It's easy to update subscriptions, look up transactions, and basically do everything we need to do. It's vastly, vastly better than our experience with Amazon SimplePay/FPS
- ScotterC 16y agoI'm using Braintree combo-ed with Recurly. Makes it simple to start accepting subscriptions. I'm a big fan of recurly and if I ever feel like coding my own, I can use Braintrees. I built my own subscription payments for Paypal before and to be honest I'd never want to use that code again. Subscriptions have a lot more headaches then appear at first glance.
- JoshTriplett 16y agoBraintree has their own system for recurring payments too; what made you decide to use Recurly instead?
- ScotterC 16y agoKnew the guys and realized how easy their product is to drop in with no setup. Full interface for any non coder to use easily. Braintree's setup and site aren't that easy or simple. If I want to put in the work, I'll fully switch to Braintree
- kieftrav 16y agoMy personal strategy has been to start out with paypal because it's super easy to integrate, and then when you have enough sales, upgrade to something like braintree. That way you wait until proof of concept and revenue before you put down money on a better solution.
- bigiain 16y ago+1 PayPal is _absurdly_ easy to set up and start collecting money. You do though, need to understand that Papal's main business advantage over banks is their automated fraud prevention/detection - if you do anything that might come close to triggering their automated systems, you need to watch out. In my experience, that's almost always been accepting payments significantly before shipping something that can be tracked. Pre orders often get accounts locked. Non physically shipped products (thing "digital downloads" - software, music, or ebooks) often get accounts locked. If you're not doing that kind of thing, or if you're doing it and are prepared to put up with Paypal holding on to your money until they believe your customers are happy, then PayPal is a reasonable solution (we have a client who starts accepting pre-orders for e new edition of his book every October, and PayPal hang on to _all_ money put into his PayPal account until 3 or 4 weeks after the books start shipping in early January. This has been going on for 4 years now, exactly the same every year, but the client is perfectly happy with that situation, he's mainly accepting pre-orders as a way to more accurately guage how many copies to print in the first run, he doesn't need to have the money up front but it's a great way for him to know really firm minimum order numbers for the first print run. It's only when he gets drunk over Xmas/new year and starts ringing PayPal up and screaming "give me my fucking money!" at anyone who answers the phone that it's a drama, unfortunately _that's_ been going on for 4 years now too... Tl;dr, use PayPal to start with. Never leave more money in the PayPal account than you're prepared to lose. Never leave that money in a bank account linked to PayPal either. Make sure you've got a backup payment method at least planned, that you can switch in sufficiently quickly that you don't go broke between when PayPal cuts off your money and the new payment system is in place (that means get your merchant account and Internet merchant ID applications in process _now_, not after you have a PayPal problem.)
- MichaelGG 16y agoAre any of the solutions out there comparable to BrainTree? It's easy to process CC's, even recurring, but it's a pain to do PCI compliance. If the CC info hits your server, you're in PCI scope. BrainTree has the browser send the info direct to them, then redirects with a token you can use to check information and perform charges. Anything else out there like that? That is, all the flexibility of being able to run charges programmatically, without the overhead of being PCI compliant?
- IgorPartola 16y agoI am no expert on this, but from what I gathered of previous discussions of this topic, is that if you are serving the form HTML, you need some form of PCI compliance, even though the CC never hits your server. This makes sense as any XSS attack would allow an attacker to lift the CC straight from the page.
- pyre 16y agoSome processors ofter an option that allows you to redirect to a page that they host for the cc information, and then back to your page for checkout.
- bradleyjoyce 16y agoI believe Spreedly's new http://spreedlycore.com http://spreedlycore.com is supposed to do this.
- drndown2007 16y agoAs I mentioned above, Authorize.Net's CIM (Customer Information Manager) works in a similar way -- you send the credit card info from your website to Authorize.net (and never store it in between) and you get a token back which you can store, and which you can use to make charges later.
- MichaelGG 16y agoBut if the CC info ever hits your server, your server, apps, etc. fall into scope. Not storing it just gets you out of a small part of PCI.
- sahillavingia 16y agoI use Stripe for Gumroad and it's amazing. Unfortunately, it's still private for now.
- dpapathanasiou 16y ago+1 for Stripe. I've coded with both Authorize.net's and First Data's APIs, and Stripe is much, much better in comparison.
- rabidonrails 16y agoYou're crazy not to go with Stripe. The only thing that's better than the awesomeness of the guys that run it is the API.
- rgrieselhuber 16y agoJust said the same thing elsewhere but I'm very happy with Stripe and strongly recommend it.
- dmazin 16y agoI'd give my left arm to get to use Stripe. I'm in the situation of the OP and I'm neither ready nor capable of dealing with PayPal and merchant accounts.
- robflynn 16y agoSame here. I'm gnawing at my face waiting on an opportunity to use Stripe.
- bradleyjoyce 16y agosuch an awesome domain name! (stripe.com) can anyone get me an invite :-)
- twakefield 16y ago+1 for Stripe
- ycw11-py 16y agoWe've migrated from authorize.net to stripe.com and we love it.
- dangrossman 16y agoIf you want something simple without writing much code, go with PayPal. You'd expect some "horror stories" from a payment processor with 232 million accounts. Virtually all of them involve someone doing something that'd raise flags at any merchant account provider or bank, it's just that people think PayPal isn't a bank so they should be able to get away with anything. 10,000 horror stories still leaves 99.99% of users happy. If you want to accept credit cards on your own site, you need to learn about PCIDSS compliance, you need to apply for a merchant account, and you need to a payment gateway that works with that merchant account. It's well within reach of a lean startup. The application is usually a page or two long, you'll get approval from the underwriting bank within a week or so, and most MAPs also resell the payment gateway accounts so they set that up for you and you get everything at once. The fixed costs will be a statement fee and a gateway fee, $20-30 a month total. It's terribly difficult to understand the fees you'll be paying with a merchant account. They're far more complex than whatever you get quoted will lead you to expect, and it's absolutely common for providers to change the fees on a monthly basis such that after a year you have no idea what you're paying. There can be dozens of classes of credit cards each with different rates when you charge them. My only advice for dealing with that is to try not to tie your code to your processor so that, when you grow enough for the fees to matter, you can shop around for a better deal. You don't get to take shortcuts with the PCI stuff. The fine for a credit card being compromised from your server because you weren't PCIDSS compliant start at $500,000 per incident (paid to Visa/MC) plus legal fees and costs to provide credit monitoring to the victims. If you accept credit cards directly on your site, you'll be required to fill out a self-assessment questionnaire and have a compliance scan against your server run on some basis. For most ecommerce setups, it'll be quarterly. What that costs depends on your merchant account provider; some contract with and pay a compliance company for you, others you have to pay some or all of the costs yourself, which can be a couple hundred dollars a year. SecurityMetrics seems to be the most popular service for the scans. The technical part is easy. An Authorize.net integration will take you a couple hours at most. There are libraries for the popular payment gateways in every programming language known to man, and prebuilt shopping carts will have plugins/modules/whatever written by people already. It's just like any other API. You POST some data to some server to make a charge/authorization/refund/etc and get a response to parse. If your app integrates with Twitter, you've already done much harder work than integrating a form with a payment gateway.
- marilyn 16y agoI have been considering FastSpring (http://www.fastspring.com http://www.fastspring.com), which has recently added subscription payments as a feature. I'm interested to hear about anyones experiences with them.
- dcheong 16y agoI believe you are referring to http://saasy.com/ http://saasy.com/ It is a bundled payment gateway+merchant. You don't have to get PCI compliant and you don't need a merchant account (no min transaction volumes, fight chargebacks for you etc). The down side is they only offer hosted payment pages and not suitable for everything... You need a finite set of goods/services you want to sell (eg monthly plans). You can't automate the process if you're building an online store where your customers can upload items for sale (eg AppStore).
- seanharper 16y agoThe terminology of payments is so weird: Payment processors refer to their business customers as "merchants". Entrepreneurs ALSO refer to their payment processors as "merchants".
- fastspring 16y agoSaaSy is a service from FastSpring, just to clarify. To see what people say about FastSpring, try searching online or you can view what they're saying here: http://www.fastspring.com/clients.php http://www.fastspring.com/clients.php Some samples: "I'm going to come out and say it: FastSpring is awesome. I haven't experienced customer service this good in my life. Every query I've had, from stupid questions to difficult questions to bug reports has been dealt with brilliantly." - Daniel Kennett, kennetnet “FastSpring is definitely the best company I have ever interacted with (note: the best company ever, not just related to e-commerce).” - Ruman Stankov, Triland Inc.
- nickpinkston 16y agoWe use BrainTree - who really worked with us more than others with our non-CC optimal payment risk (manufacturing custom parts). Although, I don't like that they're phasing out their ACH/EFT services...
- pilib 16y agoI don't have much real world experience with card processing, but the last time I looked, RBS worldpay offered a nice subscription models. I was planing to delve into that, but the project I was involved in fell apart, and there was no need for me to pursue more info. I believe that since they would handle everything transaction wise, you don't have to worry about being PCIDSS compliant.
- smil3y 16y agogoogle "square".
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- wiradikusuma 16y agoCMIIW, but square is for physical world transactions (that is, you swipe the card).
- gsiener 16y agoWe went through this recently and decided that Braintree was a nice one stop shop. Great hand holding through the set up process and lots of api/library support out there. You can always decide to put Chargify on top of that if you want. Bonus -- if you end up getting a merchant account with your existing bank you can swap that in later. (Though you probably will get a better rate w/ Braintree).
- robflynn 16y agoChargify does not work with Braintree v2 API, as far as I know.
- ANH 16y agoI'm going to be launching soon with PayPal's Digital Goods Express Checkout dealio. In theory, integration is simple, but I've found the documentation to be lengthy, incomplete, and just plain wrong in some cases. I've had speedy support responses, though. The Sandbox is handy, if clunky. If Braintree had a micropayments option I would almost certainly have tried to go with them.
- rgrieselhuber 16y agoStripe
- wmboy 16y agoOne option is Clickbank. No need for a merchant account and they easily handle affiliate commissions (if that's something you want). Downside is that people will see Clickbank.com on their credit card statement, not your merchant name (but that's the same with a basic PayPal account as well). Upside is they have a very good track record at processing recurring payments successfully (much better than PayPal) and they don't freeze your account like PayPal or Google Checkout does.
- teuobk 16y agoI know you mentioned not liking Amazon for the sign-up step, but in practice I haven't noticed much of a fall-off because of it. I use Amazon's Flexible Payments Service for taking small payments (<$2), and I've been pretty happy. About 10% of the people who click the "buy it" button on my product get to the Amazon sign-in/registration page and then bail. Abandoned funnels always sting, especially so close to completion, but is a 10% abandonment rate worse than it would be for a more direct credit card payment system? I doubt it, though I admit that I don't have any solid data to support that assertion. Might be worth trying.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- lwalley 16y agoHi there, I'm one of the founders of Chargify. Whether or not you choose to use us (our focus is the management of recurring billing, products, coupons, proration, etc.), here is an article I wrote to help startups and SMBs understand payment gateways and merchant accounts: http://support.chargify.com/kb/merchant-accounts-payment-gateways/how-do-merchant-accounts-gateways-work-with-chargify http://support.chargify.com/kb/merchant-accounts-payment-gat... If you just need to accept credit card payments of any sort, this is the foundation you'll need. PayPal Website Payments Pro is their version of gateway + merchant account, but frankly, after seeing hundreds of merchants choose this or that solution, I recommend other gateway/merchant account combos. I hope it's helpful info. Thanks. --- Lance
- colin8chSE 16y agoThere's a lot of good options and great providers, each having their pros and cons dependent on where you are in your lean startup "lifecycle". About Simplified Ecommerce: We specialize in subscriptions and our goal is to support a merchant throughout their entire lifecycle; finding product- market fit before they have a merchant account (similar to clickbank or fastspring), affiliate marketing to accelerate their growth, transitioning to their 1st merchant account and switching or adding merchant accounts as they scale. Throughout their lifecycle, adding or switching a merchant account is as simple as submitting new merchant account credentials. All their custom hosted payment pages, integrations, pricing plans, affiliate relationships, reporting...remains intact. All customer data is stored in our independent level 1 PCI compliant gateway vault and is fully portable. Our primary market is the non developer. Although Recurly, Spreedly/ Spreedlycore, Chargify and others have great, robust API's, we offer simple copy & paste "Buy Now link" type integrations. Merchants can customize hosted payment pages, switch merchant accounts, add subscription plans and set up affiliate programs in minutes, with just a few clicks. We also provide the consumer interface so subscribers can cancel, up or down grade their subscriptions without any additional integration or programming by the merchant. I'd love to hear your feedback and happy to answer any questions. We are planning to expand our private beta in the next couple months, contact me if you're interested- Colin at SimplifiedEcommerce.com
- qeorge 16y agoHorror stories you may have heard aside, I've setup PayPal's website payments pro for many clients, with tremendous success. Never had any trouble with them, and my PayPal rep has always been reachable by phone and very helpful. Additionally, I've used their recurring payments product (extra $30/month tacked on to Website Payments Pro). Its also really easy. You just send the transaction ID from a previous payment instead of the CC data , and PayPal looks it up in their vault. Only shitty part with PayPal is you have to offer payment via paypal.com as an option ("Express Checkout"), which means you get to code an extra checkout flow! But maybe you were going to offer PayPal as an option anyway, so that's moot. Authorize.net is great too, especially if you already have a merchant account setup with your bank. Their API is also super easy, and supported out of the box by most shopping carts. I've chosen not to use Recurly or Spreedly. Handling money is a bitch, I want a partner with deep domain knowledge who lives and breathes payments. Keep in mind if you store your billing data with one of these guys, and they close up shop - you're fucked. Do you want to depend that heavily on a business with no 800 number and < 10 staff? At the end of the day though, you'll have to make the call yourself. You've got no reason to believe me, the blog posts you've read, or anyone else you don't know personally. This is your business, your life - you can't just punt this one to the crowd.
- kingofspain 16y agoOnly shitty part with PayPal is you have to offer payment via paypal.com as an option ("Express Checkout"), which means you get to code an extra checkout flow! But maybe you were going to offer PayPal as an option anyway, so that's moot. As I remember it, you also have to have a direct Paypal link on your cart page (if you have one) - that bypasses any checkout process you might have (though you can redirect them back for address etc after). A bit of a pain all told!
- dataminer 16y agoDoes Paypal website payments pro offer transparent redirect like Braintree?
- tgriesser 16y agoBraintree is great, the API, docs, and client libraries are all great. I'm using it for a subscription based product and couldn't be happier with the choice, even if the minimum fees are a little higher than most, if you aren't going to be able to cover a $75 minimum per month then you probably have bigger issues with your business plan than your payments provider. The fact that they give data portability is great and the "transparent redirect" is super convenient, knowing that i have practically nothing to worry about from the PCI DSS side of things. If I ever get to the point of needing it (which I may soon) it looks like they have the ability to manage multi-merchant accounts from the same system http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/multi-merchant http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/multi-merc... Although I have heard great things about Stripe, really want to check that out soon. Also, after looking at the prices for Chargify or Recurly, it really doesn't seem to be that much of a value add for something that can be easily accomplished with the Braintree API.
- gurraman 16y agoWe're going for Braintree as well. Have heard many great things about them.
- rkalla 16y agoAre you processing any international charges with BrainTree? In tsz's post he mentioned that they don't help with that until you are doing serious volume of sales and then they will handle international charges for you.
- tgriesser 16y agoNo, no international charges with BrainTree and none in the foreseeable future. If that is a concern then it might be good to look at other options, I'd assume you'll face similar difficulties with other processors (I could be wrong).
- tres 16y agoWe've processed CCs from Beijing to Bali using Braintree. And we're not doing what I'd consider 'serious volume.'
- plasma 16y agoThere are many payment gateway's out there (for example an Australian one is http://www.eway.com.au http://www.eway.com.au - never used them/no affiliation) that let you process payments via API. I'd be inclined to pick something like that rather than use Paypal.
- rms 16y agoPaypal Pro is better than people assume. The rates are ok. There are lots of Paypal horror stories, but Paypal is actually on the side of merchants more than most merchant account providers. Yeah, chargebacks suck, but you have to deal with them with or without Paypal. Also, with Paypal Pro you get your money right away; a lot of merchant accounts require you to wait a month or more before withdrawing your money. I'm not doing subscriptions with Paypal Pro though.
- iantimothy 16y agoAs a developer based in Singapore, it seems that PayPal is the best option. Would like to ask the international developers what options have they used and to the US based companies - when are you bringing your awesome services internationally?
- bitsm 16y agoSpreedly Core is a simple API-based product for processing payments and is PCI compliant via transparent redirects (like Braintree). If all you're doing is processing one-time charges, it might be a good option to consider. Basically, your payment form posts to SpreedlyCore, which posts back to your server with a token. Your app can then perform the basic payment actions, including validation of the user's posted payment data (minus the sensitive info, of course). The service supports several gateways, and you never see the customer's payment details. The API simplifies dealing with responses. The biggest pain is that it's XML-based. Regardless, I got it up and working in about a day, and I am slow. :) It's very easy to use, and though new, the team is very responsive, and the API follows most conventions of their Spreedly subscription service, which is more mature. The only thing you need to bring is an SSL cert, but you were gonna do that anyway. :)
- andymurd 16y agoPayment processing is hard, so please give it more than a "cursory glance". Put yourself in the shoes of a brand new customer - they have lots of questions regarding your trustworthyness, billing process, refunds, pro-rating, discounts, invoicing and more. It's your job to alay those fears and be flexible in meeting their needs. Paypal is great to get started but my experience is that you'll take a hit to your cashflow at some stage. They'll freeze your account, chew up a lot of your time and make you angry. That's part of the cost of doing business with Paypal, so if you need cashflow, accountability and legal protections then go with a bank. In the early stages, don't be afraid to do a chunk of your billing work manually (producing invoices, providing refunds, calculating pro-rated charges etc). This will give you important insight into customer pain-points and you'll learn a lot about online payments too.
- skprice 16y agoI am using cheddargetter and gravity payments for a soon to be launched site. www.turlytag.com
- suking 16y agoChase Paymentech. End of story. If you need to do recurring it's trivial to write - no need for these subscription companies.
- patio11 16y agoMy opinion on this: it is very difficult for me to add value via coding the world's best possible rebilling user experience and backend admin code. It is orders of magnitude easier for me to add value via either marketing (which I need to do more of) or adding features to the product that get it in the hands of more customers. This strongly suggests that I should not be writing billing code, ever. You need a bunch of pieces to do billing. I use Paypal Website Payments Pro to physically charge people's credit cards, and Spreedly to tell them when to do it. I interact with Spreedly through a REST API that is wrapped with a Ruby gem. My entire interaction with them is one form, three model actions (which handle account creation, status change, and expiry), and a callback for when customer status changes. This took me a few hours to implement, once. Aside from a bug on my side (not charging Mastercards because I am illiterate and failed to read their documentation correctly), it has been pretty flawless. This seems to come up way, way too often. Would anybody be interested in a blog post about how to do it in a practical, pain-minimizing manner?
- bryanh 16y agoI do believe a blog post about how to practically implement such things into a framework (say Rails or Django) would do well.
- TamDenholm 16y agoThis is one of those instances where I wish everyone (specifically patio11) could see how much karma bryanh's comment has.
- mdwrigh2 16y agoPerhaps point values should be shown for your post and all of your children, so you can see what people think of the responses to your post (and the submission author can see points for everything since he's the essentially the root node). This may have been recommended in the other thread, but I don't recall it.
- kwis 16y agoI didn't mean to upvote you, I misclicked. I disagree with most of what patio11 said, and have found (like bryanh) that using ActiveMerchant with Auth.net was no harder than when I tried Spreedly. As such, I'd pass on patio11's advice and instead just get an authorize.net account, integrate that, and forget about it for the next five years.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- seanharper 16y agoI started FeeFighters, which is like Kayak for merchant accounts. I have seen a lot of misery from folks who used the recurring API of the gateways (such as auth.net, braintree, etc). If you are going to do recurring payments either roll your own using tokenization (its not that hard if your billing logic is simple), or use Recurly/Spreedly/Chargify. A big advantage that a lot of people don't immediately recognize is that using R/S/C gives you a really good CRUD for your users/subscriptions/payments/etc. Building out that interface properly isn't a good way to spend your time (spend it on customer facing stuff!).
- colin8chSE 16y agoEspecially important for lean startups when considering payment providers for subscriptions is the ability to "take your customers with you" as you grow. When using Paypal, Clickbank, Fastspring/ Saasly, they are the merchant of record, so they "own" the customer data. If you ever want to move to a different provider, get your own or switch merchant accounts... the customers that signed up with these providers will need to signup for a new subscription and submit their CC data again to transition them to your new provider. The other option is you can continue to use these old providers for your existing subscribers, and use your new providers for new customers, but that adds a bunch of complexity for technology, customer support... This isn't a unique issue with "merchant of record" companies, gateways like Auth.net have a real issue with this too, check out: http://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/Integration-and-Testing/Any-way-to-export-data-from-CIM/td-p/6264 http://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/Integration-and-... http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/open-letter-to-the-ceos-of-paypal-and-authorize-net-help-end-the-credit-card-data-hostage-situation http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/open-letter-to...
- fastspring 16y agoIt's SaaSy.com, as opposed to Saasly :)
- jerrya 16y agoI saw this company http://www.memberdesk.com/ http://www.memberdesk.com/ give a presentation last night to tieaz. http://www.tieaz.org/2011/04/13/rapid-angel-pitch-winners/ http://www.tieaz.org/2011/04/13/rapid-angel-pitch-winners/ (they were not the pitch winners). Caveat emptor, I am merely passing the link along, but I believe what they are trying to provide is making subscription membership easy.
- fastspring 16y agoSounds like SaaSy.com may be what you're looking for. You can see a comparison of SaaSy, Chargify, Recurly, etc. here: http://saasy.com/matrix.php http://saasy.com/matrix.php SaaSy is all-inclusive, and once you see the list of features and comparison chart you realize that the basic services like Chargify, Recurly, Spreedly, etc. are actually missing 90% of the solution you'll need, leaving most of the software development and administrative work for you to do over the next couple of years. As opposed to leaving everything to SaaSy and being able to instead focus on growing your business. For basic integrations, you can launch your subscription service in about 3 days and have the solution fully outsourced and handled by SaaSy, from your global taxes to chargebacks, payments, PCI, order and payment support, global currency payments, localized language-based order pages, fraud prevention, branded order and customer subscription page, cross-selling, subscription trial periods, etc. The list goes on and on, as SaaSy is truly an all-inclusive e-commerce and subscription management service that frees you up to focus on your business, and keeps you out of the complex e-commerce infrastructure business. To see TechCrunch's take on SaaSy ("Online Subscription Billing Is Still A Hassle, SaaSy Aims To Change That"), see: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/online-subscription-billing-is-still-a-hassle-saasy-aims-to-change-that/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/online-subscription-billing...
- mleonhard 16y agoIs anyone here using Money Bookers?
- fierarul 16y agoJust wondering -- how many of the solutions discussed here are available in the EU?
- tzs 16y ago[Breaking this into multiple comments, because it is too long. The subsequent parts will be replies to this] We've been accepting credit cards for about 10 years, but I've recently been looking into all of this because (1) I'm pretty sure we are getting reamed on fees by some of our current providers, and (2) we are starting a new line of business under a different brand name and want to set up credit card processing for it. The following brain dump of what I've found out might contain some things of use to you. First of all, don't feel bad if you find payment processing confusing. I've found no site or combination of sites that is able to explain what actually goes on and who all is involved in credit card processing. Braintree has some good attempts at explanations, but they are not complete. Other resources I've found explain some of the other parts. Two things complicate this. First, many companies provide many different services. If a company is providing both payment gateway services and merchant account services, they tend to merge those in any documents they write, because they want you to end up using them for both. Second, there is inconsistent terminology. Different companies sometimes use different names for the same thing. Anyway, putting together all that I've been able to figure out so far, these are the entities that have their hand somewhere in your credit card processing. I would love corrections to this. I think I'll try to put together at some point some nice diagrams in OmniGraffle and put this up on the web (after any corrections are applied). When I first use a term I'll put it in quotes, and than put it in all caps in subsequent items. I'll write this as if you are using separate companies for everything that can be separate. 1. Your "customer". 2. The "issuing bank". This is the bank that issued the credit card to the customer. 3. You, the "merchant". I assume no explanation is necessary for this item. :-) 4. Your "regular bank". This is the place you have your normal business account, and doesn't have anything particular to do with credit cards. It's just a place you keep your money. 5. The "credit card associations" are organizations like VISA and MasterCard. VISA and MasterCard are owned by the ISSUING BANKS. I'll get into their role in a bit. 6. Your "acquiring bank". You have a "merchant account" with them. When a transaction settles, this is where the money from the ISSUING BANK ends up. The ACQUIRING BANK then transfers the money to your REGULAR BANK, after deducting their fees. The ACQUIRING BANK is a little confusing because it is not really a bank. Their main role in this dance is to provide you with a line of credit in essence. If you sell a bunch of goods, the transactions settle, and you grab the money out of your REGULAR BANK and disappear without bothering to ship product, it is the ACQUIRING BANK that ends up coughing up the money when your CUSTOMERS call their ISSUING BANKS and demand that their charges be reversed. (Accordingly, this means that your ACQUIRING BANK is going to give you the biggest financial colonoscopy in this process). 7. A "member bank" is a financial institution that had a relationship with a CARD ASSOCIATION that allows them to function as an ACQUIRING BANK for cards from that association. 8. An "ISO/MSP". Those stand for "Independent Service Organization" and "Member Service Provider". These are essentially affiliates of MEMBER BANKS. They can sell you a MERCHANT ACCOUNT from the MEMBER BANKs they are associated with. I believe that ISOs and MSPs are basically the same. ISO is the term VISA uses, and MSP is the term MasterCard uses. You might think it would be best to get your MERCHANT ACCOUNT directly from a MEMBER BANK, but from what I've read it is often actually cheaper from an ISO/MSP. Also, just because an entity is a bank doesn't mean it is a MEMBER BANK. For instance, if you go down to a REGULAR BANK like BofA or Wells Fargo, they will happily sell you a MERCHANT ACCOUNT, but they will be doing so as an ISO/MSP for some MEMBER BANK. 9. A "front end processor". This is an entity that is hooked up the the CARD ASSOCIATION networks and can actually conduct credit card transactions. Your ACQUIRING BANK has a relationship with the FRONT END PROCESSOR. 10. A "back end processor". This is an entity that can actually initiate the transfer of money (via the Federal Reserve system) from the ISSUING BANK to your ACQUIRING BANK. Collectively, I've seen many people call the combination of FRONT END PROCESS and BACK END PROCESSOR a "payment processor". 11. A "payment gateway". This is what your shopping cart actually talks to, or (if you are actually physically accepting cards and swiping them) what your terminal is connected to. Its job is to accept requests from your cart ("Charge $49.95 to 5105105105105100") and then communicate with the FRONT END PROCESSOR that has a relationship with your ACQUIRING BANK in order to get the transaction conducted.
- pstack 16y agoI haven't setup payment processing since around 2002 or 2003, but it sounds like things have improved considerably. Back then, around the only option was Paypal. To get that to work (in any sort of automated fashion), you had to utilize their API and write your own custom code to process all of the communication with Paylal and your site and your database and to update accordingly (to acknowledge payments, subscriptions, user status change, re-ups, etc). It wasn't as complex as I had feared it was going to be, but it was far from simple and farther from ideal. Especially since they had a habit of changing the API and the automated services over time. I also never liked that you had to kick users out to the Paypal site at some point, to facilitate the payment.
- chrislomax 16y agoI don't think the payment process is anything that you can just glance over. The CMS I have written accepts two forms of payment, SagePay and Commidea. There are lots of good examples for SagePay in most languages. I found Commidea to be the worst integration I have ever had to do. If you use SagePay iFrame as I do then you do not ever touch the credit card, it all is handled in an iFrame and they authorise the card etc. This gets you round the PCI DSS requirements. All you need is a couple of pages to handle post backs etc to tell SagePay where to send the authorisation details etc. The problem you will have is with membership. If you're in the UK then its hard to get a bank or merchant to allow you to take 1 year memberships and take payment for them. If for whatever reason your site fails after 6 months then it is the bank who has to pay back the membership money. For this reason, I use Paypal for membership items
- speleding 16y agoMy 3 year old site depends on recurring billing so this is something I've researched pretty well. If you have many non-US customers, as I do, the short story is that PayPal is really your only option. All alternatives depend on credit cards, which are not nearly as common outside the US. I am aware of the horror stories around PayPal but I haven't had any serious problems in the last few years and I do hundreds of (recurring) transactions per day with them. That said there is a pretty long list of annoying bugs in PayPal's recurring billing solution and most of the bugs have been in there for years. The technical bugs you can work around, but the "usability" bugs are quite annoying: * If a user changes his credit card it will cancel all his subscriptions, unless he follows a specific set of steps that he won't find out about until it's too late * If a user want to change a subscription and uses a different account to log into PayPal than the one he signed up with he gets the unhelpful error message that his "subscription has expired" * If a user has two or more subscriptions and tries to change one PayPal will present him with a list of which one to change. This is a list of cryptic numbers. If he picks the wrong one it is near impossible to correct without canceling and resubscribing * There is no way to pro-rate a subscription: if someone makes an annual payment for bronze tier and a day later decides to switch to silver tier PayPal will not charge the new price until a year from now. I could go one. There are also internationalizations issues but I guess those only apply when you are outside the US like I am. (E.g. If you are outside the US then all the amounts in messages to your customers get formatted with a comma as a decimal separator, even if your customers are in US and you have your language set to US English). I've filed a bunch of bug reports over the years but I've never gotten a bug actually fixed.
- MBlume 16y agoWe're using Braintree here at Loggly, and like it quite a lot. The API has a neat little Python library that we use on our backend, and is pretty well documented. The indirection involved in posting billing forms to them means you wind up doing some interesting gymnastics if you want to include a billing form as part of a larger user signup form. You may want to check the JS on our paid signup page -- go to https://www.loggly.com/register/#woodpecker https://www.loggly.com/register/#woodpecker do an inspect element on the submit button, and expand the inline script a few lines down. The script creates an (unfunded, inactive) user on the server, receives a token pointing to this user to use in posting to braintree, and then posts the braintree form.
- rkalla 16y agoThank you for the heads up on the technical aspects of integration. Will take a peek at the JS.
- simonhamp 16y agoIf you want to integrate with Spreedly, I'll do it for $500. Just say you saw this post here on HN
- willheim 16y agoWow! The glowing reviews of Braintree really got my interested in them. So I went to their site. The best I've seen yet! Really top notch. Info flows clearly and plainly. Love it... except I'm in Canada. They don't service Canada. So, anyone got a Braintree-like company in Canada they can reco?