

Advice on web-app credit card processing and invoicing? - tacoma_wa_dev

I am developing a niche business web-application targeted at machine shops with fewer than 10 employees.
I am charging a flat-rate of $5/day for the web application with an unlimited number of users.
Customers pay up front for however many days they want. They can purchase additional days whenever they want. There is no automatic recurring billing -- the web app is simply 'paused' when it runs out of days.<p>What is the best way to go about handling credit/debit card processing and invoicing for this?<p>I'm playing around with using Paypal Website Payments Standard with encrypted 'buy it now' buttons and Instant Payment Notification (IPN).
However, the user-experience for credit-card payments with PayPal is lacking. Specifically, Paypal does not auto-redirect users back to my website if they use a credit card (auto-redirect works only with PayPal payments).
What other payment processing solutions should I be looking at? <p>Unforunately, Google Checkout seems to be behind PayPal in terms of multiple-currency support.<p>Thanks in advance!
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dpapathanasiou
Here are some news.yc discussions about this topic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5303>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322>

Perhaps we need the ability to tag discussions?

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gibsonf1
Definitely - I put that in feature requests a couple times, but it vanished in
the traffic there. It would be a huge value to all the users as you could
focus on the topic your interested in, and hopefully some of the great
comments would not get lost in time.

PG: If you're interested, we have an excellent model for classification
developed for <http://www.streamfocus.com> that is simple and powerful that we
could let you (but only you) have gratis (written in lisp of course with a
mysql back end - cached with hash tables)

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SwellJoe
Am I alone in finding tags to be solving the wrong problem? The problem tags
solve is, "How do I let contributors do extra work adding meta-data to their
contributions?"

Making search that works is the right solution to the right problem, in every
single case where tags have been used that I'm aware of. Oh, actually, that's
not true...flickr tags are extremely useful (when used by large numbers of
people to indicate a particular theme or event). But tags at News.YC or at
Reddit would be a pointless complexification of the submission and browsing
experience. Give me nicely working search (which Reddit didn't have last time
I tried it, and News.YC doesn't even try), and I'll never want for tags.

In short, I'm very strongly in the camp (assuming I'm not actually alone) that
believes tags would be bad for News.YC usability. Search, on the other hand,
would be fantastic.

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gibsonf1
The problem with text match search is that it misses on a step removed concept
search. I'm advocating classification with hierarchy, so that if you were to
click on Legal, it would give information on lawyers, on trade marks, on
patenting, etc. I think the answer is to limit the hierarchy to startup
related issues, and then users select from this list to classify posts if they
want to. Then we can have a very helpful semantic tool for finding things that
search just cant.

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SwellJoe
Yep, I know the reasons for tags. I still think they're a truly bad idea in
this context.

A limited selection of tags solves one problem, but then creates new agonizing
moments for contributors where they try to figure out whether they ought to
select one option or twelve. And a few users, the very ones I probably least
want to pay attention to, will assume that their latest blog post about their
new GTD web application crosses boundaries in unique ways and would be
relevant for all fifty-eight tags. It takes a strikingly small number of bad
results to make tags worthless...and I've seen very few occasions where the
tag features of a website are not just that.

I could be wrong...but I'd like to see an example of a site in the vein of
News.YC that uses tags effectively, before I'd even think about admitting it.

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gibsonf1
Thats a good point. If you remember the good old days, Yahoo was a hierarchy
of classified links administered/edited very carefully by humans after user
submissions. You would need to have that layer of edit control by the system
admins to prevent abuse, and I'm guessing the resources for that are not here.

(I sure wouldn't post my GTD web app in non-relevant classes though! :)

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conceptedge
Pay $20 a month and get Paypal Payment Pro. It will let you integrate the
payment collection directly into your site. Paypal will process the
authorization in the background (your backend sends something to Paypal and
process the response). This way, through out the entire process, the user
stays on your site. Paypal acquired Verisign's PayLink and Pay Flow credit
processing, and those are available as options too (albeit more expensive)

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adrianoh
Try WorldPay! www.worldpay.com

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jamiequint
Authorize.net?

