Implementing our billing system in rails: Paypal, pure Merchant Account / Gateway, or something like Chargify ?

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+1 Q:

Implementing our billing system in rails: Paypal, pure Merchant Account / Gateway, or something like Chargify ?

I've seen a few questions related to API specifics and paypal. Generally speaking if I'm going to offer my rails app as a subscription based service, what are the pros and cons of the different payment systems available on rails?

My main concerns are:

Avoiding PCI compliance, and not storing any credit cards on our servers
Easy API with recurring payments
Looking professional (not showing someone paypal branding anywhere as an example)

Paypal seems to have some "PRO" services that meet the above criteria, but I was curious about using a gateway like Authorize.NET directly?

What does Braintree offer above and beyond these?

What about Charify? It seems to be a layer on-top of gateways like Authorize.net with added dashboards and reports.

If the gateway or payment processor is storing credit cards for me, what happens if I want to take my 10,000 customers with me to a new billing service? Do they all have to enter payment info all over again? Is there a procedure in place so that different providers can move my customer / Credit Card database between them?

I recommend this write-up which will clear up many of these questions.

Joe Martinez 2010-07-19 21:20:08

+2 A:

We've used Chargify and it's great for a couple of reasons:

PCI compliance: Chargify handles the storing of the credit card
Auto Charging: Will auto charge the credit cards after N months and a trial period
Dunning: Will email users if the charge fails, and try several times before expiring their account
Great Gems: the chargify gem rocks.

So I highly recommend using Chargify with Authorize.net

Cons:

Chargify adds about $0.10 to each account per month in addition to your merchant fees

Jesse Wolgamott 2010-07-19 21:27:53

Can I use any merchant account?And what happens if I'd like to ditch Chargify one day? I lose all my customer cc info?

Zaqintosh 2010-07-19 22:41:12

@Zapintosh -- they let you use a number of them, but probably not "any" merchant account. List: http://chargify.com/how-it-works/ ... I would say yes, if you cancel chargify you'll need to re-capture card information at renewal time.That problem is only prevented if you store the CC yourself, which you almost certainly don't want to do for the PCI compliance.

Jesse Wolgamott 2010-07-20 01:02:30

I also use chargify for the above noted reasons and cannot complain. The additional cost in processing is minor in comparison to time spent re-inventing the wheel and compliance issues.

David Lyod 2010-07-20 08:59:42

I've just learned that Chargify doesn't actually store credit card numbers, they use the payment gateways's "vault" to store credit cards for you. This means that if you change gateways, you have to deal with their policies on transferring credit card info to a competing gateway service.Anyone know Authorize.NET 's policy on transferring customer data to another gateway if you want to leave?

Zaqintosh 2010-07-21 05:55:58

ansaurus

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Implementing our billing system in rails: Paypal, pure Merchant Account / Gateway, or something like Chargify ?

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