I've written a subscription based web app that I want to charge (by credit card) a monthly fee. There are 3 different plans and once they sign up, they should be billed that amount, automatically, every month until they cancel. Is there an easy way to set this up (some sort of online service maybe?).
You can use Paypal's merchant service to provide reoccurring charges for a subscription.
Pretty easy to implement, they provide plenty of examples and even a sandbox to get you up and running.
There are now some service providers that take care of your billing and subscription needs. You use their API and they handle billing and subscriptions for you. Their services work with payment systems like PayPal and Authorize.Net.
Take a look at the following sites:
Chargify
Spreedly
Cheddargetter
I would suggest not using Paypal or Authorize's recurring payments directly. Their APIs are brutal, and the functionality is very rudimentary. It may work fine for when you're just starting out, but if you ever want to change anything down the line, you'll be in trouble.
I work for CheddarGetter, so I'm biased, but you should check us out.
Our competitors are not as robust or flexible, but they are definitely better than using Paypal or Authorize.net directly.
Related
I'm looking for a way to allow our clients to do recurring payments to discount these payments based on the credit in their account which can be earned or deposited in many ways. For example, if they need to pay $20 and have $5 in credit, I would like to only bill the remaining $15 automatically without any need for additional website visits.
Looking at the documentation for PayPal's REST APIs, I don't see any clear way to do this. Is the only way to do this to send them a refund automatically? Or is there a way to get approved to bill clients up to X amount per month but allow us to bill under that amount. I thought billing agreements would allow for this, but after reading the documentation, I'm unable to figure out a way to do it. If it's possible, could someone walk me through what API calls would be needed to do this?
Thanks for any help you can offer.
There are a couple of different ways you could do this sort of thing, but I would avoid the REST API for now. It's still too new and doesn't provide as much functionality and features as the classic API.
Within the classic API, you can use either use Preapproved Payments, which consists of Preapproval and Pay APIs, or you could just use Express Checkout and/or Payments Pro with Reference Transactions.
Either way you'd basically be building your own recurring payments system where you'd setup a billing agreement and then your app would trigger the variable amount payments accordingly.
I just wanted to ask among the gurus here if anyone has ever attempted to test a complete transaction from start to end on an ecommerce site using paypal or any other epayment gateway.
Please guys, I would appreciate any thoughts and comments. As it is a live site, I cant use the sandbox as that will negatively impact sales. However my firm is a startup and so can't afford the complete transaction and refund process that was suggested [here]:Accepting dummy credit cards on a live site with ActiveMerchant & PayPal.
Please help!
Previously I tested by buying low cost items from myself - that way you're only paying commission and you're getting most of the moneyback.
Admittedly you need 2 Paypal accounts, but that shouldn't be a problem, and you should only have to 'kick the tyres' in the live environment because all your testing will have been done in the dev environment.
We had a similar problem during startup and still use this process in the live site. We have specific "test" products that we purchase using a live credit card, then monitor the transactions: purchase, decline purchase, subscription (recurring billing), cancel, refund, etc.
Our test product is priced very low (5 cents). For subscriptions, the billing interval is 1 day, for a maximum of 3 intervals (with a free trial period of 1 day). This allows me to run a full test/validation, including recurring billing, in the live environment in less than a week.
We refund all charges following the test, which puts the money back on the credit card (or back in the PayPal account). Because of the refunding, our sales impact is zero (offsetting sale and refund). It does cost us a small non-refundable PayPal fee for each transaction, but that amounts to $1 or less.
These "test" products are not exposed to normal users. Also, we manually verify any "test" sales to make sure they are part of our internal testing.
"Sandbox" testing is the way to go during development, but a periodic test in the live environment is necessary to be verify that nothing is amiss.
Why not use a real credit card, then give yourself a refund? The commision fee is returned in that case.
All the time that I want to test our live sites we use a real credit card.
Thanks
I don't understand why you can't use the sandbox..?? How would using it negatively impact your sales? It's all fake.
Just setup your own sandbox.yourdomain.com version of your site and use that as your test server. Configure it to use PayPal's sandbox with sandbox API credentials, etc. This will allow you to go all the way through an order process and test everything from the UI stuff to payment processing, API requests/response processing, IPN, etc.
When everything is working you sync it up with your live server, which is hitting the live PayPal server, of course.
Again, I don't see how that would impact you in any way other than being a successful testing solution..??
Before jumping in I'd like to know what all of my options are, and, if possible their pros and cons.
The two I know of are using ActiveMerchant, or the paypal_recurring gem, but will they satisfy these requirements?
Ability to accommodate monthly and annual billing
Ability to suspend, cancel accounts etc
Deal with out-of-date card details or failed payments
The to-do list for the paypal_recurring gem includes 'adding support for IPN' - how will not having this impact functionality?
I know there is the railskit SaaS but I'd rather code something myself as the railskit is still on 3.2.1.
I know there are services like cheddergedder/chargify etc, but do they tie you in? Are they US only? Are they worth considering - or are they usually just aimed at non-developers?
Thanks in advance.
I just finished going through this, so I'll try to shed some light on your options. I ended up using Paypal Express Checkout for all recurring purchases through Paypal. We had a custom-rolled recurring billing setup that charges a customer's credit card monthly through Authnet, but had to switch because we needed an international solution, and Paypal was one of the only ones that supported the currencies we needed, and wasn't entirely a nightmare to code.
You can use ActiveMerchant for recurring billing with this plugin, though keep in mind that it is not officially a part of ActiveMerchant, and therefore is subject to break if ActiveMerchant changes how it handles certain things. Because of that, I ended up using the paypal-recurring to handle communication through Paypal, and then rolled my own IPN parser, with help from Railscasts. Another link that helped me a lot was this, though all the :txn_type values ended up being different.
With regards to that last link, here are the 4 :txn_types that I specifically watch out for:
express_checkout - first postback.
recurring_payment_profile_created - sent on first postback when the user first subscribes.
recurring_payment_profile_cancel - sent if user cancels subscription from Paypal's site.
recurring_payment - Money has been transferred to your account. This is what I wait for before I renew their subscription on a monthly. This post also comes with payment_status, which needs to be completed.
The other stuff you mentioned, like handling failed payments and out-of-date cards, is handled through your Paypal account.
Just a word of warning - the only reason I ended up using Paypal is because it is universally recognized and trusted, and it accepted international currencies. There is an enormous amount of documentation on their site, and most of it is redundant, confusing, and entirely too long. My recommendation is to make sure you really want/need to deal with recurring payments, as they are difficult to implement correctly and can be more trouble than they're worth.
I'm currently looking at Ryan Bates example of Stripe. They are a California based company that uses/offers the features you have listed.
www.stripe.com
They only charge when you receive money. I think that they are 3% plus $0.30 per successful transaction. Much better than some other companies that have a monthly minimum. Right now you have to have a bank in the USA to use their services as a merchant. However, anyone can use your site with out of the country credit cards.
The SaaS Kit is now tested with Rails 3.2.2. :) It doesn't support IPN yet, but it's on to the todo list. With all the info here in one spot, I suppose I have no excuse not to get it done. :)
I'm trying to create a simple personal project: I want to give myself bounties for completing tasks that often fester on my todo list. If I complete a task, for example, $5 should automatically move out of my savings account into a discretionary spending debit card.
Are there any APIs or banks that have those APIs that could let me do that? All of the paypal APIs seem to charge a fee, which would be kind of silly if the money is simply moving between accounts. Any suggestions?
Most banks/organisations will charge I suspect as a vast amount of money made by these organisations is from transfer charges. I cannot think of free api that would let you do it.
However you could consider using another commercial organisation, say like Amazon, and perhaps use it's APIs to supply purchase with gift cards automatically? I'm not saying Amazon is free, I'm just using it as an example.
It's not quite what you want but may be acceptable.
it may not be pretty, but you can use curl to do transactions over https, provided your online bank uses standard html forms in some way, but it typicaly takes 3 processes
1. Login to get a token (user name and password will be required)
2. Use token to get a cookie (in some cases 1 and 2 are reversed)
3. use curl to post the form data for your transaction
There are some good pointers on using curl in similar ways here:
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html
I am looking for the easiest platform or API to integrate into my site that would allow users to sell goods and get paid for them. I would, of course, take a small percentage of the payment. Hoping for something that is usable from python, though php would work too.
You need split payments. I think only Paypal currently offers that.