
What is the cheapest and/or easiest way to accept credit cards online for subscriptions? - pfisch
What is the cheapest and/or easiest way to accept credit cards online for subscriptions?
======
tx
I spent a full week evaluating Amazon, PayPal, Authorize.net and a couple of
smaller players (don't remember their names). I even posted a detailed report
here somewhere in August.

Authorize.net _is_ the big daddy of online payment processing. I found it to
be most developer-oriented too. Amazon suffers from unnecessary complexity and
tied to their own stuff too much, besides not a single support person (on the
phone) knew anything about it. PayPal was not very "customer friendly", in
fact their sales people sounded like typical scammers/car salesmen and overall
PayPal not as developer-friendly as authorize.net

In the end I implemented everything (one-time payments, scheduled payments,
etc) in just two evenings using a couple of PDF downloaded from authorize.net.

By the way, another reason to use them is the dev. community. Thousands of
devs built stuff for authorize, i.e. there are libraries, code samples and
docs on numerous blogs for every imaginable programming language/framework.

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bayareaguy
I think cheapest and easiest depends on your situation. I've used
FreshBooks[2] with PayPal for some online services. I've also used Kagi[1]
too. I'm looking forward to Amazon DevPay[3] when it becomes generally
available.

[1] <http://www.kagi.com/index.php>

[2] <http://www.freshbooks.com>

[3]
[http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=342429011](http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=342429011)

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iseff
There was a good thread about this a couple months back on 37Signals blog
([http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-
do-...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-you-
process-credit-cards)):

The thing to note here, in my opinion, is to _not_ implement it as they have.
Do not store the credit card numbers on your own system. Instead, read through
the comments. A few people talk up TrustCommerce
(<http://trustcommerce.com/>), and it looks pretty good .

Note: I've never used it, just pointing out what others said. I do plan on
using it sometime, however.

~~~
lisper
I've used TrustCommerce and I highly recommend them. I've also used authorize,
paymentech, and cybersource. TC is head-and-shoulders above the rest IMO.

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speby
BrainTree (www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com) works great. You could store CC
info if you want but with their SecureVault, you can have them store it and
get back a unique token for the customer. In this way, you can still process
your subscriptions and charge customers each month but you store no critical
CC info in your own system.

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xirium
The easist method depends upon your customer. Therefore, it could be
beneficial to implement multiple payment mechanisms. Customers could pay
through the most familiar and trustworthy mechanism. You could most heavily
promote the method that takes the least commission. This would allow new and
experienced users to select the most optimal method autonomously.

An often overlooked payment method is sending a cheque in the post. For many
people, this is considered to be a superior channel for security. It also
allows payment for those without a credit card. It also increases trust
because you have to provide an accurate postal address. From my experience,
sales by cheque equal sales online. Therefore, you can double sales with this
option.

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nate
They all kinda suck it seems in some way. I'm working with PaySimple now and
the service has been pretty nice, but it was a lot of paperwork and hassle,
and now the effort in using the API..

I just looked at ClickBank. <http://www.clickbank.com/recurring_billing.html>

They were the defacto standard of people selling ebooks, but now they look
like they have a recurring option. Their commission is higher I'm sure than a
merchant account + gateway, and you have to use their credit card form, but
it's probably the easiest to setup and lowest setup fees.

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showerst
Authorize.net seems to be the bigdaddy in the space, and in my experience
they're a pain to set up, but service is fine once you've obtained an account
and wrapped your head around thier Extensive but hard to navigate
documentation/API.

They also offer options of writing your own form and CURLing them to submit
the data, or using one of thier forms, and they offer pretty good payment
tracking (including search by cc data, and quickbooks files).

Not sure about thier price point, but the few credit-card processing
businesses i've worked with have all chosen it prior to my involvement, so i
assume it's a good 'safe' choice.

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bprater
The real challenge is building out the back-end that deals with the service
you select. (Unless you plan on handling unsubscribes manually, which might
not be a bad idea if you are dealing with a low volume of users. IE: I'd pay
someone $8/hr for an hour a day before I committed an $80/hr developer to
spend a month building a system, until they are spending more than an hour a
day dealing with orders.)

I was consulting for a company where we spent weeks building and testing the
back-end component that worked with Paypals API. Their API is embarassing.
Instead of building a system that allows you to poll for unsubscribes daily,
their server "pings" your server with data periodically. Imagine the
difficulty of testing this out when they don't provide a way to simulate this.

So if you do decide on a back-end, spend some time seeing if there is an open
source component you can use to handle subscribe/unsubscribes. (Maybe
ActiveMerchant?)

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pfisch
I've looked at paypal but does that support adjusting subscription plans
easily?

~~~
NoBSWebDesign
I don't think they have that option, but I haven't looked in a couple years.

I generally try to stay away from PayPal, because they're not a bank. Their
user agreement states that they're not liable or responsible for "lost" funds,
and I've heard of people getting burned by that. If you use them, I would
advise withdrawing often.

~~~
kingnothing
They burned me for somewhere around $300 when I sold some stuff on eBay.
Allegedly, the account that I was paid from was "hacked", so they took money
out of my account about a week after the transaction took place. I will never
give that company another dime of direct or indirect income again in my life,
be it from my personal or business life.

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ratsbane
I've been looking at Google Checkout. One compelling advantage is that they
don't charge CC processing fees up to 10* what you spend on AdWords. Has
anyone here had experience integrating with that?

They don't explicitly handle subscriptions now but that wouldn't be hard to
build a recurring charge process.

[http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=63440&query=subscriptions&topic=&type=)

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thinkcomp
We've written a web-based accounting system that integrates with
Authorize.Net's AIM API. It's kind of like NetSuite, but a lot less expensive.

~~~
asisproperty
What's it called?

~~~
thinkcomp
Exponent. Its page is at:

<http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent>

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izak30
authorize.net supports subscriptions. it's pretty easy to manage, but I don't
know if its the cheapest (it's at least reasonable for our needs, and easy,
which is more important than cheap to me most of the time.)

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iamelgringo
Sounds like an opportunity for a good startup. I've heard this question
bounced around a number of times online. Doesn't really sound like there's one
great service out there.

~~~
pchristensen
If you've got the cojones to put a clean, non-leaky abstraction on top of
payment processing, you might just find a customer or two.

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Prrometheus
What about for micro payments?

~~~
ericwaller
Paypal is almost certainly the way to go for micropayments

[https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.ht...](https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.html)

$0.05 + 5%

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kingkongrevenge
Has anyone looked into just calling a bank and getting a merchant account? Are
these other online services really that much value added?

~~~
kingnothing
If you're running a web site with any amount of customers, you're going to
want to let people manage their own subscriptions with no intervention
required on your part. If you don't have a way to integrate CC payments in to
your product, then you would have to do everything manually.

You still need to have a merchant account in addition to a billing service,
and for that, you could just use your local bank if you wanted to. I'd imagine
that an online bank would have cheaper fees since there's no brick and mortar
side of the business to maintain, though.

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Coachfrits
The lowest cost and easiest way is to use our free API and processing
services. E-mail me at coachfrits1-blog@yahoo.com

