What is a Recurring Billing service?
Charging someone’s credit card and making sure that the money ends up in your account is what Payment Gateways and Merchant Accounts are all about, but what about handling a subscription that needs to get charged every month? That’s where the subscription and recurring billing systems come in. These services have a credit card vault, and a list of recurring charges, and it’s their job to make sure that every month the right people get charged the right amount.Some services, like Recurly, focus entirely on this problem, and were built on top of other payment gateways and merchant accounts. Meanwhile, payment gateways have evolved and launched simple recurring billing modules on top of their payment gateways.
While some payment gateways have existed for decades, the recurring billing space is not nearly as old. The companies that focus on recurring billing as their core have developed a bunch of features to make your life as a software developer easier, such as sending emails to your customers with their invoices, pro-rating upgrades and downgrades, and managing dunning (i.e. handling when a credit card has expired or rejected a charge).
What is a Payment Gateway?
Payment Gateways are the backbone of online payments and e-commerce of all kinds. If someone is taking your credit card online, they are probably using a payment gateway. It is these guys that connect to all the credit card companies like VISA, Mastercard and AMEX to make it easy to collect any kind of credit card you want without having to submit to Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.What is a Merchant Account?
Once a credit card is charged, the money needs to go somewhere. That’s where a merchant account comes in. A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept money from payment cards. If you want to accept credit cards online, you will need a merchant account. You might not realize this because some payment gateways will provide you with a merchant account behind the scenes, but there will always be a merchant account in the mix.So, How do I pick?
Here are three questions that will help you narrow down your search.
Question 1 – What do your payments look like?
Are you doing simple plan-based billing, or are you going to be charging for variable usage? If you’re building something complicated, then you probably want to look at a company that focuses on SaaS as their primary business instead of a “Hybrid” payment gateway. If you’re doing simple plan-based billing, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it can be to configure some of the Hybrid gateways to do just that.Question 2 – Where are you?
Some providers are only available in a select few countries. For example, Stripe is only available in the USA and Canada, while others, such as Paymill, focus on the European market. Payment processing law is a complicated, region-dependent beast, so you want to make sure that you have the right mix of payment gateway and management layer to help you navigate the legal maze for where your company is headquartered.Question 3 – How much can you spend?
Most hybrid gateways don’t charge extra for their subscription layer. That’s great news if you’re doing something simple, but if you need the power of the subscription-focused services, you’re going to have to pay extra. Most companies have a mix of monthly fee plus transaction fee, and don’t charge anything to get started. That said, there are some companies, like Zuora, that charge a five-figure price tag to get set up and don’t work with companies under $1M in yearly revenue.Read more: http://www.referralsaasquatch.com/how-to-pick-a-recurring-billing-and-payment-provider/
Keys to consider
- Payment Gateway Support: Does the provider offer payment gateway support in your country? Do you have a current account with one of their gateway providers? Do they offer their own payment gateway? Some providers offer their recurring billing, gateway services, and merchant account all in one. Others offer combinations of the two, and still others offer just the recurring billing service.
- Payment Methods: Depending on your business type, you may want to accept different types of payment methods. This could be credit card payments, EFT, ACH, PayPal, checks, purchase orders, wire transfers, etc.
- Credit Card Data Portability: A good recurring billing provider won't hold your customer credit card data hostage. Look for a provider that will transfer your credit card data to another PCI compliant vendor, should you ever leave their services. Bonus points if they don't charge you for it.
- Physical Goods: Most recurring billing providers have core functionality around electronic subscriptions. If you're shipping physical goods, make sure your recurring billing provider can handle the collection of and reporting on shipping information
- Reporting: Does the billing provider share reports necessary for your business?
- Customer Communication: Does the billing provider handle automated communication to your customer, or will you need another provider for this functionality?
- Dunning Management: Does the billing provider follow up automatically on failing transactions? How often? Is it configurable?
- Taxes: Based on your location, you may want a billing provider that handles sales tax for your purchases
- Multi-currency: Based on your customer pool, you may want to offer your product in multiple currencies. Does you billing provider support each currency you'd like to list?
- Support: What sort of support model does the billing provider have for your company? Do you need a dedicated account representative? Phone support? 24x7 support?
- Integration: Billing providers can vary their integrations from the very simple (A checkout form hosted on their site) to full API integrations on your site. Does the billing provider host the type of integration you're looking for? Do they offer integration assistance (Typically at a professional services fee)
- Billing Model: This is a big one. Does the billing provider have billing periods (daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly) to fit your billing needs? Do you have any unusual billing requirements like billing on the 3rd Tuesday of every other month? Does the product support free trials, setup fees, multiple subscriptions, additional products, gift subscriptions, pausing subscriptions, upgrading/downgrading plans... etc.
http://www.quora.com/Which-is-better-Chargify-Recurly-ChargeBee-or-Spreedly
1. PayPal has partnered with Aria Systems to provide subscription/recurring billing services (see PayPal Subscription+). You can use your own merchant account or PayPal
2. Recurly: very nice subscription billing platform, but fairly expensive ($29/mo + $0.20/transaction on top of your merchant fees) - requires your own merchant account
3. Chargify: good features and pricing (they bill by customer, not transaction) - requires your own merchant account
4. Cheddar Getter: offers a free plan, bills by customer - requires your own merchant account
5. Spreedly: $19/mo + $0.20/transaction - supports LOTS of different gateways including international
6. Zuora: If you have lots of money to invest, they could be a good fit - seem to be catering more to enterprise payment processing not SMB
(Jason Read)
Read more: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-checkout-tool-for-recurring-payments
My personal recommendation for scalable recurring payments is to get a merchant account through FeeFighters.com, use the (usually free/included) default gateway of the account provider (usually Authorize.net), and use the (rather elegant) Recurly.com APIs to handle all the recurring stuff. Just make sure that you're using Recurly's vault and not using Auth.net's CIM so you have full data portability if/when the time comes ( http://blog.recurly.com/2010/05/... ) .
Paypal
If you're building a side project or something less ambitious, PayPal's recurring payments solution is certainly good enough.
(Sachin Agarwal)
Also: http://sachinagarwal.com/introduction-to-online-payments-tldr-its-a-to
Read more: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-checkout-tool-for-recurring-payments
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/general/RecurringPaymentFAQs-outside
5. Can a customer without a PayPal account still pay for recurring payments with a credit card?
Yes, if you offer both PayPal Payments Pro and recurring payments.
But PayPal Payments Pro is only available in US, UK, Canada
Lack of dunning management
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