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Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

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Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#111

Post by dangrossman »

kwis wrote: post #93
rahoulb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the credit card numbers ever travel via your server? Even temporarily in memory? If so you are liable for PCI-DSS section C, which is a LOT of hoops to jump through. Spreedly saves you from that.

It took us a couple hours to be in compliance with section C. If memory serves, we dealt with a vendor who did a scan, made us install AV software on our Linux boxes, and one or two other minor process adjustments. It wasn't a big deal. Given Spreedly's current prices of the lesser of $0.20/transaction or 2%/transaction, this minute quantity of work is currently providing us with a return of approximately $12,000/mo.…

I don't understand how Spreedly is somehow providing you a "return". They sit on top of your payment gateway so you pay everything you would've paid withluan in-house integration, plus Spreedly's fees. Coding your own subscription billing is a one-time thing as well. Where are you saving money?

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#113

Post by tres »

rkalla wrote: post #102
tgriesser wrote: post #48

Braintree 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 an…

Are 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.

We've processed CCs from Beijing to Bali using Braintree. And we're not doing what I'd consider 'serious volume.'

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#114

Post by dsl »

rkalla wrote: post #100
dangrossman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take much to improve the billing experience over sending someone to an external website, to pay with payment pages that are minimally customizable to match your site. You lose the ability to tweak and test one of the most important parts of the customer acquisition experience. There's a >10% conversion rate gap between different checkout flows I've tested on one of my ecommerce sites. I've written my own s…

dan, because you are holding the CC information on your site and POST'ing it out to external services at authorize.net, did you have to do any work for the "PCI" compliant/privacy stuff I see? I read a few posts on forums that if the customer financial data is ever on a page you wrote, you come under the realm of at least some PCI compliance because of a possible XSS attack getting that information out of your forms.…

"PCI Compliance" is like keeping a drivers education book in your glove compartment. It's good because every once in a while you find it and it makes you think about safety. Unfortunately it does absolutely nothing to actually make you safer.

Lots of bark, absolutely no bite. There is not a single case where a bank will shut you off and stop getting your processing fees.

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#115

Post by rahoulb »

kwis wrote: post #105
rahoulb wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understood it you have to have written procedures and policies, with fully secure change control and logging for section C ?!?

You need a written security policy, but that was pretty close to pro forma. The compliance firm wrote us one which we disseminated appropriately. You basically just need to follow some reasonable security standards. Firewalls, ssh/ssl admin terminals, no shared credentials, and then follow a basic security policy.

Thanks, that sounds a lots less complicated than the advice I was given.

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#116

Post by rahoulb »

dangrossman wrote: post #111
kwis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took us a couple hours to be in compliance with section C. If memory serves, we dealt with a vendor who did a scan, made us install AV software on our Linux boxes, and one or two other minor process adjustments. It wasn't a big deal. Given Spreedly's current prices of the lesser of $0.20/transaction or 2%/transaction, this minute quantity of work is currently providing us with a return of approximately $12,000/mo.…

I don't understand how Spreedly is somehow providing you a "return". They sit on top of your payment gateway so you pay everything you would've paid withluan in-house integration, plus Spreedly's fees. Coding your own subscription billing is a one-time thing as well. Where are you saving money?

It may be a one-off cost but writing a billing system is still a few weeks work. Pro-rataing on upgrades/downgrades, support for one-off overage fees, refunds, credits. Plus dealing with the fallout when you get a decimal place wrong in a tax calculation and accidentally charge a customer a hundred times what you were supposed to (guilty).

One of my clients paid $700 for Spreedly kickstart plus their percentage transaction fees, plus a couple of hours for me to integrate it. Significantly less money then three or four weeks of my time to write a billing app from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#117

Post by [deleted] »

rahoulb wrote: post #116
dangrossman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how Spreedly is somehow providing you a "return". They sit on top of your payment gateway so you pay everything you would've paid withluan in-house integration, plus Spreedly's fees. Coding your own subscription billing is a one-time thing as well. Where are you saving money?

It may be a one-off cost but writing a billing system is still a few weeks work. Pro-rataing on upgrades/downgrades, support for one-off overage fees, refunds, credits. Plus dealing with the fallout when you get a decimal place wrong in a tax calculation and accidentally charge a customer a hundred times what you were supposed to (guilty). One of my clients paid $700 for Spreedly kickstart plus their percentage trans…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#118

Post by dangrossman »

rahoulb wrote: post #116
dangrossman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how Spreedly is somehow providing you a "return". They sit on top of your payment gateway so you pay everything you would've paid withluan in-house integration, plus Spreedly's fees. Coding your own subscription billing is a one-time thing as well. Where are you saving money?

It may be a one-off cost but writing a billing system is still a few weeks work. Pro-rataing on upgrades/downgrades, support for one-off overage fees, refunds, credits. Plus dealing with the fallout when you get a decimal place wrong in a tax calculation and accidentally charge a customer a hundred times what you were supposed to (guilty). One of my clients paid $700 for Spreedly kickstart plus their percentage trans…

Maybe the math works out like that when you bill four weeks for a two day job. Startups can and do find programmers that write robust billing code with those features in a day or two. I've done it more than once. I run both ecommerce sites and subscription web apps -- the billing code handles upgrades, downgrades, pro-rating, one-off overage fees, refunds and credits. Once you've done it once, doing it again and testing for another site is a few hours work.

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#119

Post by bryanh »

bryanh wrote: post #65
patio11 wrote: post #62

My 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…

I do believe a blog post about how to practically implement such things into a framework (say Rails or Django) would do well.

Just in case anyone is wondering, the parent comment earned 26 points (which is one of my highest point counts to date).

Re: Ask HN: How are lean startups easily accepting CC payments?

#120

Post by kwis »

rahoulb wrote: post #115
kwis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a written security policy, but that was pretty close to pro forma. The compliance firm wrote us one which we disseminated appropriately. You basically just need to follow some reasonable security standards. Firewalls, ssh/ssl admin terminals, no shared credentials, and then follow a basic security policy.

Thanks, that sounds a lots less complicated than the advice I was given.

The only situation where I can imagine it being a pain is if you aren't already following good security procedures.

If your ops/DevOps guys are experienced pros, they're probably going to be pretty close to compliant, just out of habit. That said I guess it's not terribly hard to envision a scenario where there's no firewall, bad user access controls, and a host of other crap that could be painful to fix if you only have junior-level ops talent.

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