

One simple API for all your payment gateways - olalonde
http://www.payfacade.com/

======
teej
I've used Ruby's ActiveMerchant (based off of Shopify) on several large
projects. It is really simple to use, especially for someone that doesn't deal
with payments often.

<http://www.activemerchant.org/>

Using a different gateway is a one-line change. Running test data is easy. It
supports every major gateway and payment company. And it's free.

If you're using Ruby, I can't recommend it enough.

~~~
xal
thank you for the kind words :-) . ActiveMerchant turned out to be one of
those quick things I put together while making Shopify that took on a life of
it's own. Amazing success. At one point Cody took a 2 week vacation after we
shipped Shopify and while he was gone we got 3 new gateways contributed that
all immediately became available in Shopify. Even if he would have stayed back
and coded all day he couldn't have created so many production ready gateway
backends.

~~~
jmonegro
How does it work with PayPal? Do I send the data like with any other provider
and paypal will authorize it? or does the user still have to be redirected to
them?

~~~
eli
It is indeed possible to use PayPal as a gateway. I believe the product you
want is Website Payments Pro (what used to be Verisign), but their offerings
are completely indecipherable and I suggest just giving them a call. This also
has the benefit of getting you to a person to help guide you through the set
up process.

~~~
andrewf
"Website Payments Pro" is the one that will accept payments into your PayPal
account, and "PayFlow Pro" (nee Verisign) is the one which accepts payments
into your merchant account at a bank.

IIRC, both will take money from a credit card (which can be entered directly
onto your site) or via Paypal payments (which requires a redirect to some
stuff on paypal.com).

------
SingAlong
I like the idea very much.

Offering both pay by subscription and pay by transaction. Both has it's use
cases. If I was running an ecommerce platform I would prefer to pay by month
and if I want to sell ebooks on my blog, I would choose the second option to
reduce costs.

P.S: Why do I get a confirmation message that says just "powered by wufoo".
Maybe you should add your own message in it :)

~~~
olalonde
It's my first time with WuFoo :) Should be fixed now.

Thanks for pointing out and thanks for sharing your thoughts on payment
options. We will make sure to appeal to both larger and lower volume
merchants.

~~~
andyana
It still showed up for me just now ;)

------
holdenk
It looks like an interesting concept, but if it truly is going to make it
seamless to switch payment API providers they are going to have to store card
details (assuming you don't want to store card details and you are currently
storing card details on the gateway), since I don't think gateways let you
dump the card details back out.

It seems like the main value proposition is you can switch payment gateway
providers (or use multiple ones for say canadian/us transactions) without
having to move payment APIs. If I'm really trying to avoid having to switch
APIs, what sort of gaurantees do I have that you guys will be around next
month?

One big concern for me is that it seems that if you fold I lose the ability to
bill recurring customers unless I store CC data (something I'd rather avoid).

~~~
olalonde
We perfectly understand your concern. Our way to deal with it is that we try
to use payment gateways' built-in recurring billing as much as possible in
order to make it easy for our customers to move off our platform. We also
offer the possibility to export any data that you own.

------
zefhous
A couple thoughts to improve the home page:

1\. There are a few typos you should fix if you want to seem credible. "Don't
wory" should be "Don't worry," there's no period in the first sentence of the
small text, and there is an extra space before both exclamation points (I know
that's a French thing to do, but it's not standard in English).

2\. Don't use jpegs for this type of image, a PNG will be much more crisp.
Right now there are clarity issues in the blue surrounding text.

3\. If you use text in the HTML instead of using an image it will be much more
friendly. The small text looks very odd on a Mac and in browsers that have
good font rendering and anti-aliasing.

Good luck!

~~~
olalonde
Thanks, I've fixed those issues. Good guess on the French thing, that's
actually my mother tongue.

------
harisenbon
It looks very nice, but I'm wondering if it has support for paypal
subscriptions?

There are a glut of payment gateway API services, but very few of them support
good subscription-based processing.

~~~
juvenn
Have you noticed z-billing:
<http://www.zuora.com/products/zbilling/index.html> then? Though not startup
friendly, I guess.

------
terpua
This looks like a MVP using mockups. How do you plan on competing against
Recurly, Chargify, etc.?

Edit: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1300500>

~~~
olalonde
We don't think we will have to compete with them as we offer a different
service. They could actually become our customers to offload the pain of
implementing different APIs for all of their supported payment gateways.

------
MichaelGG
Are you going to help with PCI compliance, say, by letting us use JS to post
card data direct to your site, and only returning an ID code?

~~~
lftl
This please. It doesn't have to be JS, if I can just POST my form to their
server, and have the user redirected back with a token that'll work just as
well.

Braintree does this, but they're rather pricey.

I've wanted this feature bad enough I've considered launching my own service
to do it. Surely there are a decent number of sites out there that want to
retain control of their payment form, but want to seriously reduce PCI scope.

~~~
dan_manges
We (Braintree) are priced competitively. We may look higher than others
because we don't use any pricing trickery ( <http://bit.ly/cUyJTa> ) and
bundle gateway services. We created a checklist for merchants to help them
avoid getting duped <http://bit.ly/9W57Pw> .

~~~
lftl
I should clarify. Braintree is perfectly competitive as long as you're
handling some volume (20K/mo or so), and are willing to roll your gateway and
merchant account into one provider. For smaller ventures, not so much.

~~~
bryanjohnson
It's actually between 2-5k per month, depending on average ticket. For
merchants looking to maintain volumes less than that for the long term, other
providers will cost less in monthly fees (but may have a higher total cost
when including other items such as pci compliance, recurring solutions, etc.).

------
locopati
Clicked 'Get Started' thinking that would give more info. In Chrome, there's
no way to exit that dialog and return to the main screen (no exit button, no
cancel button, Esc does nothing). Overlooking something so obvious makes me
distrust anything else the service might offer.

~~~
olalonde
Thanks for pointing this out! Have you tried clicking outside the box?
Anyways, we will add a close button to make it more intuitive.

------
rksprst
Do you have a beta ready, or are you just seeing if there is an interest for
this (ala the lean startup methodology)?

Also, how is this different from chargify, recurly, spreedly, or even
braintree?

~~~
olalonde
We are indeed trying to see where to focus and get some very early feedback.
That being said, a big chunk of the code is already done :) The private beta
should launch in the next following weeks.

I would say our service operates at a lower level of abstraction than the
services you mentioned. Our ultimate goal is to make it simple to integrate
with any payment processor.

------
MichaelApproved
Nice concept. I dont have a site ready to use for a beta so don't need to sign
up for that. Is there a Twitter feed or email list to stay updated on the
progress?

------
kwamenum86
If you click "Get Started", then click "Powered By Wufoo", then close the
dialog by clicking in the shaded area, the back button breaks in FF 3.6.3.

------
omarchowdhury
How exactly is this going to work? Are you just going to be adding as many
modules (different payment gateway APIs) as you can?

~~~
olalonde
That's pretty much the idea. There will be only one external API that
developers can use, but internally, we will make sure to make it work with as
many payment gateways as possible. We will then implement other features but
that should be our core service. I've had to implement many payment processors
for different clients in the past years and it really is a pain. I'm basically
building this for myself :)

~~~
omarchowdhury
I'm building something similar for myself at the moment as well, so when I saw
your product on the front page of HN, I thought "wow, great timing." But looks
like it's still conceptual (to everyone else.. I'm sure you've got code in the
works already) ;)

So how are you going to be testing the payment gateway APIs that you choose to
include? Live accounts or maybe you've got someone at each gateway who can set
you up with a test account?

Also - a lot of gateways do include load balancing, so some people might be
better off just going with their original gateway, instead of adding another
layer of complexity (and costs).

But I definitly think you got a viable idea going here... there is money to be
made, simply cause your startup is in an area which wouldn't exist if there
wasn't any money being moved around.

Good luck.

------
DanBlake
So its a saas version of aMember?

