What credit card merchant do you use?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mark Johnson on May 4, 2009 at 3:20pm

Hi Truman-
Braintree is good, and they have not required $100K/month for clients that I've set up with them. They also seem to like rails developers - see http://railskits.com/blog/2008/05/using-braintree

Another option that you might consider is http://www.authorize.net

Aloha,
Mark

Permalink Reply by Truman Leung on May 4, 2009 at 3:30pm

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the response. When was the last time you setup a client with Braintree?

If I go with CDGCommerce, I will also use Authorize.net's customer information module (CIM) for storing credit card information securely on their servers.

aloha,
Truman

Permalink Reply by Mark Johnson on May 4, 2009 at 3:36pm

Last one I set up was in Sept of last year. I've been talking with them in the past few weeks though as I have 2 more that Ill be setting up in the next month - and they haven't mentioned the 100K minimum.

Permalink Reply by Truman Leung on May 4, 2009 at 3:48pm

I think I got the $100K minimum from this post: http://ask.metafilter.com/96754/Not-moneylaundering-I-swear

Even the RailsKit post you cited had an Oct 2008 update about minimums.

I'd be definitely be interested if you wouldn't mind confirming with them that there really are no minimums.

Permalink Reply by Laurence A. Lee on May 4, 2009 at 5:35pm

I have used SecurePay in the past for low-volume or seasonal businesses like Flea Market vendors with reasonable success. The transaction rates may be higher, but that was the trade-off we decided upon for convenience and the ability to "halt" the account during the off-season if needed.

They worked out particularly great for me, as they provide a Web Page that can accept "Card Swipe" data if you have the appropriate hardware. Other providers like Authorize.Net require you to program against their API to get equivalent card-swipe functionality. Furthermore, Authorize.Net treats "card-swipe capable accounts" as completely separate and incompatible with eCommerce Capable accounts -- which means you'll run into issues if you're tying a Brick n' Mortar operation (using card-swipes) to an eCommerce Shopping Cart that doesn't use swipes.

I didn't investigate Authorize.net workarounds to that separate-entity issue - we took the easy way out and just switched away from Authorize.net.

Permalink Reply by Laurence A. Lee on November 12, 2009 at 4:31pm

In case anyone's still interested in recurring billing, I came across a blurb about Chargify.com, which has a freemium model worth looking into.

Permalink Reply by Mark Johnson on November 12, 2009 at 10:39pm

Very cool - chargify.com has an interesting business model, as it takes some work to develop a SaaS recurring billing with full tests etc. (and this is one area that you really, really, want full test coverage :)

We ended up going with Authorize.net for Menumill and ecoBorrow - using their CIM to store customer info - and we are happy so far.

I actually signed up as an Authorize.net reseller: https://merchant-apply.com/tastyloungemf
If you haven't already signed up with a gateway and merchant account - the link above will get you all setup (it also waves the $99 gateway setup fee, and 50% off the normal authorize.net monthly fee :)

Permalink Reply by Truman Leung on December 18, 2009 at 6:03pm

Hey Laurence and Mark,

Thanks for the replies. I still haven't changed my billing system yet. Chagrify looks very promising! However they don't yet have an API call to allow you to upgrade or downgrade a customer from one product to another or add on products. But they are working on that feature. That would be key for me as I would like to restructure my business model to allow for ala carte add-ons for the "up sell" rather than the "one size fits all" approach I currently use.

Mark, did you develop your billing system from scratch or are you using something like ClientExec or WHMCS?

Permalink Reply by Mark Johnson on December 19, 2009 at 4:37am

We went with the SaaS Railskit