Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.
But what if you already have a merchant account, or a retail offering, or an e-commerce site? What if you want to have a subscription product, or store a customer's credit cart for repeat business?
The first thing to consider is security. If you're going to repeat a transaction, your customer's credit card number needs to be stored somewhere. If that's on your web site, you become a target for attack. As a company that hosts e-commerce systems for our clients, we would just as soon not have to protect thousands of credit card numbers. Fortunately there are quite a few payment gateways that can store the sensitive information for us, and all we need is a unique transaction number to use for future charges.
In Ubercart, the recurring payments module has been removed from the core e-commerce system and put in its own module. This work is incomplete, but we are using it (carefully) in production. It's going to take time for the modules for various payment processors to catch up, but here's a quick run-down of a few gateways we've looked at, which features they can support, and which features work today. But first, a little lay of the land.
Thanks, John. This was a very helpful write-up. I've just been doing some research on recurring billing for a very specific type of implementation, and information like this helps add some background as I try to determine the most efficient strategy. I was looking at UC Recurring to see if it will make the most sense to use that given a potential need to code support for an additional payment processor and integration with some other functionality for the site.
I've been trying to get a feel for general experience using the module, CIM vs. ARB vs. WP, and status on some of the payment processor integration. You mentioned you're using it "carefully". Has anything crept up in the last few weeks that has been a concern or challenge?
- Matt Winters
Kinaba / WebNewCastle