Automatically charging customer card each month

[Victor Congionti]

Hello All,

I've already implemented the Paypal action and calculate the monthly payment action. I was wondering if there was a a way to automatically charge a customer's card each month a specific amount for x amount of months? Thanks!

[Open eSignForms]

PayPal does offer a monthly billing option (subscription), but it uses a different API and I believe PayPal charges an additional monthly fee to have this.  I have no idea why PayPal charges extra for that API since you'd think they like to make money processing credit cards, but alas, that's now their current business model.  Just by using PayPal with credit cards like that you have to be sure you are PCI compliant, which entails quarterly security scans and such.  They seem to abuse smaller vendors while companies like Target lose tens of millions of credit card details that PCI compliance would have precluded them from ever storing in the first place.

Have you looked at WePay?  We are contemplating adding WePay APIs as they seem to have a cleaner solution for small businesses in that no credit card information is ever accepted by the small business and is instead only collected by WePay who maintains the PCI compliance.  They offer both one-time and subscription.

Regardless, as open source, it should not be too hard for you to create this as an additional feature.  If you do, we'd be happy to review it and add it to the core. 

We've not fully investigated PayPal subscriptions to know what it would mean or what the user experience is.  PayPal still struggles with the concept that they want your customers to have a PayPal user account (could be required for subscriptions to work in their model). They generally require that you offer your customers the option to pay by PayPal instead of entering a credit card -- they seem to think PayPal payments are the norm and reluctantly operate as a merchant account. 

WePay looks like they charge about the same fees, but their interface is geared more like a merchant account with a popup dialog for authorizing the purchase or subscription via credit card or bank information (EFT) without confusing the purchaser to login, and your site doesn't ever gather the information and so is freed from the PCI compliance issues. 

[Victor Congionti]

WePay seems very user friendly like you mentioned. The only reason we went with Paypal was for the 2.2% processing fees vs the 2.9% WePay charges and also for the brand name. So far PayPal has been doing everything we want it to do but the PCI compliance piece seems very attractive with WePay. I will contact PayPal and work with our developer to explore our options with monthly billings. Thanks for your detailed response!

[Open eSignForms]

If you are getting 2.2% from PayPal, you must have over $10k in credit card charges monthly.  But that's a good find on WePay as those higher rates can matter for small businesses that do a lot of CC sales.  (Most of our enterprise customers still pay by check.)

Do know that PayPal charges $30/month for the benefit of using the APIs, and I think an additional $30/month to handle subscriptions via the API.  WePay has no such fees.  So the CC rate difference if you have at least $10k in monthly credit card sales is just 0.7%, meaning you need $4285 in monthly sales just to pay for that fixed cost, and if you do subscriptions too, it becomes $8500/month.  And the monthly fee is charged whether you used it or not, and if not, your volume is lower and you pay the higher rates.  As your volume increases, other more dedicated merchant accounts may start to make sense.

I agree that most have heard of PayPal over WePay.  But I doubt most care who is performing the merchant account activity, and our experience is that customers rarely select to pay using PayPal balances.

Either way, we'd be happy to help you with that development course should you pursue it.  It's just not high on our To Do list at this time.

[Theodis Butler]

Stripe is a good developer friendly payment processor that handles subscriptions easily--high fees though but definitely worth it. PCI compliance, good documentation, etc. I may take a stab at it. I haven't loaded the project into Eclipse yet but I am looking forward to it once I understand the product inside and out.