credit card or other payment gateway software

[travis+m...@subspacefield.org]

Hello,

I'm looking at developing a commercial web app that needs to collect
money from people at regular intervals (a subscription service).

I am doing this in my spare time, not as part of a current job.

I can solve most of the technical problems.

The part I don't really understand is how to process payments.

I know I can use the Paypal payment APIs, but does anyone have good
links on information regarding how to take periodic credit card
payments?

If I end up using Paypal's API and there isn't already software out
there to do this, I'll try to publish my code in some useful way.
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[chris mollis]

try authorize.net.  I used them a long time ago and generally had a good experience. 

[Jamie]

> If you are a spammer, please email j...@subspacefield.org to get blacklisted.
>
>  application_pgp-signature_part
> < 1KViewDownload

The gotcha is the recurring subscription payments. You could store
the CC info in your own database and charge the card each month, but
you're in a world of trouble if your DB is ever cracked. Unless
you're willing to go through the process of PCI certification, it's
generally easier to just use a payment processor can can handle the
subscriptions for you. Both PayPal and authorize.net can do it.

In my experience, coding for either companys' API isn't all that
hard. But authorize.net is a bit cheaper IIRC. Plus not having to
deal with PayPal is a big plus.

[Jonathan LaCour]

Jamie wrote:

> The gotcha is the recurring subscription payments. You could store
> the CC info in your own database and charge the card each month, but
> you're in a world of trouble if your DB is ever cracked. Unless
> you're willing to go through the process of PCI certification, it's
> generally easier to just use a payment processor can can handle the
> subscriptions for you. Both PayPal and authorize.net can do it.

+1

We handle monthly recurring payments for our subscription application
(shootq.com), and elected to go with Authorize.NET after an initially
terrible experience with PayPal. I can't recommend Authorize.NET enough
-- they are fantastic! Talk to Chuck at Midwest Transaction Group to get
your account, and he'll get you rolling quickly.

If you are planning on having fixed monthly subscriptions on a contract
basis, you can use Authorize.NET's "Automated Recurring Billing" (ARB)
API. Its fine if that is all you need.

For our purposes, we want to be able to do more than just simple monthly
subscription billing, with the ability to give away free months, run
promotions, sell other one-off items, etc. So, we use the Authorize.NET
"Customer Information Manager" (CIM) API instead. It stores all of your
customer information and credit cards for you, and you just tell it
whenever you want to run a transaction against the customer's card, and
in what amount. You can even specify line items to appear in the
customer receipt.

The APIs are both XML-based I believe, and I rolled my own library for
accessing the Authorize.NET CIM in just a day or two using mako and
httplib. You should be able to do the same.

Best of luck to you --

--
Jonathan LaCour
http://cleverdevil.org