41–50 of 125 posts
I know you mentioned not liking Amazon for the sign-up step, but in practice I haven't noticed much of a fall-off because of it. I use Amazon's Flexible Payments Service for taking small payments ( About 10% of the people who click the "buy it" button on my product get to the Amazon sign-in/registration page and then bail. Abandoned funnels always sting, especially so close to completion, but is a 10% abandonment rat…
I'm one of the founders of Chargify. Whether or not you choose to use us (our focus is the management of recurring billing, products, coupons, proration, etc.), here is an article I wrote to help startups and SMBs understand payment gateways and merchant accounts:
http://support.chargify.com/kb/merchant-accounts-payment-gat...
If you just need to accept credit card payments of any sort, this is the foundation you'll need. PayPal Website Payments Pro is their version of gateway + merchant account, but frankly, after seeing hundreds of merchants choose this or that solution, I recommend other gateway/merchant account combos.
I hope it's helpful info.
Thanks.
--- Lance
If you want something simple without writing much code, go with PayPal. You'd expect some "horror stories" from a payment processor with 232 million accounts. Virtually all of them involve someone doing something that'd raise flags at any merchant account provider or bank, it's just that people think PayPal isn't a bank so they should be able to get away with anything. 10,000 horror stories still leaves 99.99% of use…
Authorize.net also offers a hosted option so that the merchant doesn't have to deal with the burden of PCI compliance. In other words, the merchant (you) never sees the credit card number. http://developer.authorize.net/api/sim/
Pretty nice if you want to do things like "we'll bill your credit card only when item ships", etc.
About Simplified Ecommerce: We specialize in subscriptions and our goal is to support a merchant throughout their entire lifecycle; finding product- market fit before they have a merchant account (similar to clickbank or fastspring), affiliate marketing to accelerate their growth, transitioning to their 1st merchant account and switching or adding merchant accounts as they scale.
Throughout their lifecycle, adding or switching a merchant account is as simple as submitting new merchant account credentials. All their custom hosted payment pages, integrations, pricing plans, affiliate relationships, reporting...remains intact. All customer data is stored in our independent level 1 PCI compliant gateway vault and is fully portable.
Our primary market is the non developer. Although Recurly, Spreedly/ Spreedlycore, Chargify and others have great, robust API's, we offer simple copy & paste "Buy Now link" type integrations. Merchants can customize hosted payment pages, switch merchant accounts, add subscription plans and set up affiliate programs in minutes, with just a few clicks. We also provide the consumer interface so subscribers can cancel, up or down grade their subscriptions without any additional integration or programming by the merchant.
I'd love to hear your feedback and happy to answer any questions. We are planning to expand our private beta in the next couple months, contact me if you're interested- Colin at SimplifiedEcommerce.com
Additionally, I've used their recurring payments product (extra $30/month tacked on to Website Payments Pro). Its also really easy. You just send the transaction ID from a previous payment instead of the CC data , and PayPal looks it up in their vault.
Only shitty part with PayPal is you have to offer payment via paypal.com as an option ("Express Checkout"), which means you get to code an extra checkout flow! But maybe you were going to offer PayPal as an option anyway, so that's moot.
Authorize.net is great too, especially if you already have a merchant account setup with your bank. Their API is also super easy, and supported out of the box by most shopping carts.
I've chosen not to use Recurly or Spreedly. Handling money is a bitch, I want a partner with deep domain knowledge who lives and breathes payments. Keep in mind if you store your billing data with one of these guys, and they close up shop - you're fucked. Do you want to depend that heavily on a business with no 800 number and At the end of the day though, you'll have to make the call yourself. You've got no reason to believe me, the blog posts you've read, or anyone else you don't know personally. This is your business, your life - you can't just punt this one to the crowd.
I use Stripe for Gumroad and it's amazing. Unfortunately, it's still private for now.
I'd give my left arm to get to use Stripe. I'm in the situation of the OP and I'm neither ready nor capable of dealing with PayPal and merchant accounts.
I have been considering FastSpring ( http://www.fastspring.com ), which has recently added subscription payments as a feature. I'm interested to hear about anyones experiences with them.
It is a bundled payment gateway+merchant. You don't have to get PCI compliant and you don't need a merchant account (no min transaction volumes, fight chargebacks for you etc).
The down side is they only offer hosted payment pages and not suitable for everything... You need a finite set of goods/services you want to sell (eg monthly plans). You can't automate the process if you're building an online store where your customers can upload items for sale (eg AppStore).
The fact that they give data portability is great and the "transparent redirect" is super convenient, knowing that i have practically nothing to worry about from the PCI DSS side of things. If I ever get to the point of needing it (which I may soon) it looks like they have the ability to manage multi-merchant accounts from the same system http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/multi-merc...
Although I have heard great things about Stripe, really want to check that out soon. Also, after looking at the prices for Chargify or Recurly, it really doesn't seem to be that much of a value add for something that can be easily accomplished with the Braintree API.
I'd be inclined to pick something like that rather than use Paypal.
There are lots of Paypal horror stories, but Paypal is actually on the side of merchants more than most merchant account providers. Yeah, chargebacks suck, but you have to deal with them with or without Paypal.
Also, with Paypal Pro you get your money right away; a lot of merchant accounts require you to wait a month or more before withdrawing your money.
I'm not doing subscriptions with Paypal Pro though.