Recommend a payment gateway that allows recurring/incremental payments?

Question

Can someone recommend a payment gateway that allows incremental (irregularly recurring) charges to the same card?

I've looked at PayPal - they offer a recurring payment systen, but you can only charge payments on a schedule (the same amount at regular intervals), so it doesn't work for me.

What I'm after, is a payment solution without these restrictions - where you can charge the customer repeatedly, without asking for their credit card information again.

In other words, the payment gateway should probably work like PayPal, in the respect that you put in the credit card information once, and you get back a token/key, which you can safely store in the site's database, since this token can only be used to transfer money from the associated card to the account for which the token/key was originally created.

Note that the Direct Payment option offered by (for example) PayPal does not work me either, because it requires me to either (A) store credit card data in our database (ILLEGAL), or (B) ask the consumer for their credit card number, CVR and expiration date, every time (IMPRACTICAL).

In my own personal opinion, using PayPal checkout and/or Google checkout would be a great option - these are brands that people trust, and the checkout process is simple, since you only have to log in and confirm your purchase.

But my client is concerned about looking professional - although I don't personally agree that using third-party checkout makes you look unprofessional, the client is also concerned about the fact that users have to leave their site to pay.

Any recommendations?

Oh, and if the payment processors you recommend also had a reasonable fee schedule, that would of course be a big plus!

Answer 1

Nobody offers an irregularly occurring subscription service because there's no way to automate a subscription that can be charged at arbitrary times. To accomplish this you'll need to create your own subscription system that manages the "when" of the subscription as well as the "how much". You then can use the API of your chosen payment processor to process the transaction.

An example of this would be to use the Authorize.Net Customer Information Manager (CIM) API to store customer billing information, including their credit card information, and then have a cron job that periodically polls the database and, when a user meets the criteria for a payment, calculate the proper amount and then use the CIM API to process their credit card. The integration is seamless so it will look as professional as you can make it.