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

#1

Post by rkalla » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:32 PM UTC

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.

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

#2

Post by zackattack » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

assuming 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.

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

#3

Post by MadQA » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

Take a look at 2checkout, they have some recurrent billing functionality out-of-box.

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

#4

Post by salsakran » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

I'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.

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

#5

Post by thankuz » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:47 PM UTC

Might 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.

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

#6

Post by base » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 11:51 PM UTC

most 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.

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

#7

Post by MicahWedemeyer » Thu, Apr 14, 2011, 12:03 AM UTC

Been 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

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

#8

Post by jaddison » Thu, Apr 14, 2011, 12:03 AM UTC

salsakran wrote: post #4

I'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.

I'd be interested in your open-source Django app. Sounds like a great idea.

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

#9

Post by ScotterC » Thu, Apr 14, 2011, 12:07 AM UTC

I'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.

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

#10

Post by kieftrav » Thu, Apr 14, 2011, 12:09 AM UTC

My 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.