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Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

pintpay.com

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#71

Suggestion, you need a big fat section on your site that addresses why I should trust you. Integrating a payment system might be easy, but switching to something else if your system is shut down isnt. So my biggest concern moving to something is, what if your product fails for whatever reason, how can I be assured that I can leave easily and that I will get x days of advance notice. Im sure you can plan for this but…

> Suggestion, you need a big fat section on your site that addresses why I should trust you.

I can't upvote this enough, as a guy who's been actively researching recurring billing solutions recently.

For the benefit of the OP, here are a few absolute dealbreakers that would make me not even consider you right now. Please take them as constructive criticism intended to be helpful:

1. You appear to be two guys with Linode, running a business that doesn't yet have a track record. IMHO, that means you need to be backed by either a large, established company or a provable insurance policy that means I'm still getting what's due to me if you go under. Remember, you are asking people to trust you with one of the most important parts of their business.

2. You ducked the PCI question, and apparently didn't even realise that you had. You have just lost all credibility, probably for good if anyone researching you ever finds this thread as it stands right now. I respectfully suggest that, as a minimum, you post a statement here that makes it clear that you do understand the implications of PCI and you know exactly where both you and your prospective clients fit into the scheme of things. (As an aside, I would be interested to know how you can possibly provide the service you seem to be offering while using a shared hosting service and still be PCI compliant.)

3. On a related note, you don't mention anything about getting my customer data out of your system if I ever want to move away. You need a robust, straightforward process to do this, again including a guarantee that there will be an opportunity for me to use it before you disappear to a tropical island/under a bus/into bankruptcy court.

4. Net 60? Ditto to what everyone else said. Additionally, saying it's for fraud protection loses you points: if I'm using a service like this rather than going straight to payment gateways and merchant accounts, using a service that can offer robust fraud protection schemes and fight chargebacks on my behalf is a major plus, which several of your competitors offer to a useful extent. If you think you need to keep all of my money for 60 days (or even 30) in case of chargebacks, I have to wonder how easy it is to game your system.

5. If you don't have a robust API/callback system, I suspect you don't have a product worth anything to most of your target market. Ditto if you can't export comprehensive reports in a format readily imported into common accounting software and/or provided to professional accountants.

6. Given that you're up against relatively well established small-scale opposition now and of course some Internet giants, your fees are uncompetitive. If you don't have the power and the established reputation they do, you need a lot more than a slightly lower rate to stand out.

7. In due course, if you want to handle international transactions for clients based in Europe, you'll need to be aware of the tax and data protection rules, and you'll need to be able to give absolute guarantees that everything you do will fall within those rules (for example, not transferring any personal customer data outside the EEA). Being US-only is a deal-breaker for now for many of us anyway, but you knew that.

I do wish you luck, as intermediary payment services have a lot of potential benefit and more competition is good for all of us. However, looking at the web site so far, my honest view is that you don't look ready for a public beta yet. If you are, I respectfully suggest that your FAQ needs to be a lot less chummy and a lot more to-the-point regarding the questions above so potential customers like me can see that.

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#72
post #55

Holding payments with a Net-60 term? That hurts.

Hi, the net 60 is just during the beta period and really there to combat fraud. I assure you it is not to help "bootstrap." We intend to lower it later to 30 days. Edit: if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we would consider lowering that number from 60 for approved/verified merchants.

Thanks for the response. Many of the other comments are now putting this into context.

However, realize that if I were to switch to your service I might see a huge disruption in our business' income. Even 30 days could be tough for some considering Paypal makes our money available instantly.

We bring in approximately 80% of our income through Paypal, and have rolled our own subscription management service. We are also actively looking to migrate that to Recurly in the 3Q of this year.

In that context, how would you differentiate yourself from Recurly and the others (Chargify etc) ? If it is regards to having your own payment gateways, that's great! But I'd be seriously worried about fraud since Paypal (and other payment gateways) have extremely mature fraud protection programs that have matured over many many years. I'd love to hear further how your offering matches up against that.

Thanks!

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#74
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks great, and it's a shame I can't sign up, since I'm in Canada. Is it just the need for a US bank account that's holding me back?

Our lawyers are looking into the international payments, but the honest answer is that it adds a ton of complication so we're only accepting US merchants at this time. Sorry, but if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we'll keep you posted about when we intend to support Canadian merchants.

This would be a nice thing to put on the FAQ page (country restrictions on both subscribers & merchants.) As an Australian I assumed I knew the typical answer, but I went to double-check anyhow.

(I assume also that when a merchant gets paid via Paypal not cheque, that means the merchant is also paying Paypal's 1.1-2.4%+Xc on top of pintpay's 3.6%+30c? Is that right?)

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#75
post #36

Here's some feedback: * You should figure out a way not to require the payer to choose a password. Especially if they're already choosing a password on my service, now they're choosing two passwords. I understand that you're using this to handle plan changes and cancellation. * Allow people to sign up for "free" products, too. This could potentially allow people to completely delegate their pricing pages to you, and…

My business partner and I were talking about a service like this the other day. If PintPay was to act as an OAuth provider, it might resolve the password issue.

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#76
post #8
post #4

Are you guys PCI compliant?

Good question. From the FAQ: Do I need to worry about PCI Compliance? Nope! By using PintPay, you never store credit card information on your servers. In fact, that information isn't stored on our servers either. (Edited.)

I was very interested in your product at first, but this answer turned me off pretty quickly.

The site looks good, the service seems nice, but I'm not convinced you are PCI compliant based on the answer here and the Linode tag on your website.

I mean no offense by this comment, but payments are quite important, so I'm just pointing out what is making me feel uncertainty.

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#78
If you have a high monthly revenue the 3.9% is pretty steep. The $60/month for paypal get's wiped out above $6k per month. It may be good for a small, low dollar value businesses, but as one commenter mentioned, net 60 days is BS.

There is no free lunch, payment processors get you one way or another.

Re: Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

#80

After reading the story of self-publishing whizkid Amanda Hocking http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_... I was inspired to start writing again. Rebuilding emphastic.com, I really wanted to find an easier way to integrate some kind of self-publishing eBook payment system, and this looks test-worthy. In general, the timing is excellent, too. Google's Samsung Android tablet, the iPad2, etc.; the…

If you're looking to self publish I'd just focus on Amazon, B&N (if in the US, otherwise publish there through Smashwords), and Smashwords. Sure it's 70/30 split, but you also get on their lists of also bought if you can manage enough sales. I haven't heard of any author making major money self pubbing through their own website, it's been primarily through the major ebook retailers. It's what the big players like Hoc…

+1 -- and having gone through publishing a book on Lulu and Amazon, both services are fine to get dead-tree versions of your book into the hands of your readers (and you don't have to build a payment solution -- or anything other than the marketing verbiage).
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