Experience with billing systems

Question

It would be very useful to have feedback on the various API and services that let you bill the customers, so it's possible to compare :

• Security;
• Quality of API;
• Commercial reliability;
• Number of languages that can use it;
• General usage of them;
• Ease of set up;
• Economic price;
• Technical price.

I thinking here of course of PayPal, Google Checkout but bank credit card based systems as well.

Pascual

Answer 1

• Braintree (and to some extent, other lesser payment gateways)
  • Pros
    • You're in complete control of the billing system
    • You can do more complex payment setups
    • Widely supported for multiple programming languages; ActiveMerchant support
    • Some of the best support you'll ever see for e-commerce
  • Cons
    • You probably have to deal with PCI DSS security compliance
    • Potentially a lot of extra work (which may very well still be worth it)
• Google Checkout
  • Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30
  • Pros
    • Very low transaction processing fees
    • Fantastic if you're already using Google for advertising
    • Google handles a lot of the messy stuff involved in billing, like chargebacks
    • There's now support for subscriptions (in beta though)
  • Cons
    • Google's API is different enough from other systems that you usually have to use a library specifically designed for Checkout (e.g., no ActiveMerchant support)
• Paypal
  • Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30
  • Pros
    • Widely understood API; tons of stuff available for dealing with it
    • Essentially supported by everything
  • Cons
    • Lots of people are very vocal about not wanting to do business through PayPal due to bad experiences
  • Neutral
    • Tends to be popular with the young adult demographic who don't have credit cards and with eBay users
• Amazon FPS
  • Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30, lower for bank accounts and balance transfers
  • Pros
    • Probably your best bet for micro-transactions
    • A good choice for payments for physical goods
  • Cons
    • I don't know enough about the system to say for sure

Tip

Answer 2

If you want to accept credit/debit card payments online, you're going to need two things:

• an Internet Merchant Account (a business bank account which can accept such payments; there's usually quite a bit of business compliance, risk and anti-fraud attached, but if you're a serious business with an existing business account, talk to your bank)
• a Payment Services Provider (who provide you with, for example, an API or a hosted checkout solution, and who act as the go-between for your web site and your IMA, which will typically only provide very limited options)

There is, of course, a fast growing trend of alternative payment services; PayPal, Envoy, MoneyBookers, Neteller, uKash, etc. Those are definitely worth exploring, because they tend to provide a certain degree of risk-free/guaranteed payment, and they dramatically widen the numbers of customers you can reach - think in terms of people who aren't old enough to have cards, or who aren't able to get them due to debt problems or the like.

Perhaps the easiest combination is to find a Payment Services Provider who can handle the whole lot - set you up with an IMA (or rather, underwrite your risk with a bank so they'll be happier to give you one), provide payment processing services, maybe a bit of fraud protection and risk management on top, chargeback management, and then handle all those possible payment methods, including things like 3D Secure (Verified by Visa/Mastercard SecureCode) which can be a real headache to integrate with.

If you're going to be getting into the business of handling online payments, even if it's just an occasional thing, then you'll need to knuckle down and do a bit of serious research into what you need, what you don't need, and what you're willing to pay, 'cause payment service providers obviously charge for this stuff, and it'll be a serious business partnership.

For once, Wikipedia seems to have an appallingly lightweight list, so you may want to Google "payment services provider".

Tanker