What options are available to accept credit card payments through an iPhone?

Question

What are the options to accept a credit card payment from an iPhone application? This will be a stand alone application, not an iPhone specific web site. Can I integrate with a payment gateway like Authorize.net? What about paypal or Google checkout? I know on some web sites, it will take you to a paypal site for the payment authorization - can this be done over http requests, instead of forcing the user to another website (which won't be available from the app)? Are there any security concerns with these payments from an iPhone as you can't install an SSL certificate?

I don't want to use the Apple micro-payments that will be available in the 3.0 release as there will be many small charges, and I don't want to give 30% to Apple each time.

Is this even possible, or will I need customers to create an account on my web site beforehand, pay with their credit card, and then have the iPhone interact with my database to get their available balance (the amount they charged through the web)?

Answer 1

It's really quite easy to charge money with PayPal. It just depend on what kind of feedback you want from PayPal. See PayPal's Developer site for more info.

EDIT: I really should explain what I mean by "feedback".

When a user is sent to the PayPal site to pay, you can send him there using a fairly simple web-form (yes, a plain <form>...</form>.) If you only have 1 product, then this form can even be static HTML.

The tricky part comes after the user pays.

Option 1: Check you PayPal account manually for the payment. If the user paid, then you e-mail him, and send whatever you wanted to sell him. Easiest method, least amount of code. The downsides are that you'll have to do a lot of manual checking, and basically this is just a drain on your attention.

Option 2: Get automatic confirmation from PayPal in your application. Either by getting post-backs sent to an HTTP server by PayPal, or by actively querying the PayPal server for confirmation after waiting enough time for the transaction to have gone through. This means the user gets immediate feedback once the transaction is complete. You could even automatically send him the product! The downside is that such a solution is a lot more code.

Oh, and every time I said "PayPal"? All the services I just mentioned are provided by every credit-card authorization gateway I've ever seen.

Answer 2

I think that 30% is well payed...

• No need to think about credit card fraud
• No need to think about secure certificates
• No need to think about server problems like downtimes
• No need to thing about creating a nice UI and description of How to use
• No credit card needed to buy as the user just need to fill up the iTunes password, so they can buy anywhere, everywhere

• No need to spend a lot of time debugging and testing, the SDK is great and works like a charm if you just follow the documentation

  And you can always add 5 dollars more to cover the 30% on what are you trying to sell.

  Remember that if you have a lower price, you will have much more buyers and you can have much more profit that a few buyers with a higher price.

Answer 3

I'd like to use the iPhone SDK Store Kit but you are not allowed to use it for purchasing real world goods and services or for transferring money, my customer's applications require these. So I'm looking into adding forms to my application to gather credit card details and use https posts in a background thread to communicate with a payment processing provider. Does anyone know if this would get my 'app' rejected by Apple?