Best/Easiest/Most-Reliable Recurrent Billing Service today for E-Commerce Site?

Question

I am going to build a product management system on rails that will allow the admins to create products, donations, and subscriptions, and allow users to buy products, donate, and subscribe, with a price range anywhere from $1 - $50,000.

I haven't really enjoyed my experience with PayPal so far as the documentation isn't that great and it's difficult to do simple things, but it's the most widely used... And there's Google Checkout, TrustCommerce, BrainTree, and Authorize.net, so it's difficult to determine what I should use in this case. From the Rails Freemium github project, it lead me to this article on the Paypal Subscription Blues... which, although it's from 2007, suggests subscriptions are difficult to handle with PayPal.

So my question is, what do you recommend to use for payment processing (in particular, recurrent billing) to make a very large and reliable, and hopefully easy to use, eCommerce system?

Answer 1

PayPal is the 800-pound gorilla.

But why not do more than one? Some of your customers might not be able to use PayPal for whatever reason.

Answer 2

You're probably going to want to support more than one payment processor.

If I understand your description correctly, you are talking about building something like e-junkie.com. One of the main selling factors for a service like this(the main reason I signed up for e-junkie) is that they support multiple payment processors. If the customer already has a Google Checkout account but you only support Paypal, that becomes a barrier to entry.