Experience with billing systems
api, billing, google-checkout, paypal, security
Solution
- Braintree (and to some extent, other lesser payment gateways)
- Pros
- You're in complete control of the billing system
- You can do more complex payment setups
- Widely supported for multiple programming languages; ActiveMerchant support
- Some of the best support you'll ever see for e-commerce
- Cons
- You probably have to deal with PCI DSS security compliance
- Potentially a lot of extra work (which may very well still be worth it)
- Google Checkout
- Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30
- Pros
- Very low transaction processing fees
- Fantastic if you're already using Google for advertising
- Google handles a lot of the messy stuff involved in billing, like chargebacks
- There's now support for subscriptions (in beta though)
- Cons
- Google's API is different enough from other systems that you usually have to use a library specifically designed for Checkout (e.g., no ActiveMerchant support)
- Paypal
- Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30
- Pros
- Widely understood API; tons of stuff available for dealing with it
- Essentially supported by everything
- Cons
- Lots of people are very vocal about not wanting to do business through PayPal due to bad experiences
- Neutral
- Tends to be popular with the young adult demographic who don't have credit cards and with eBay users
- Amazon FPS
- Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30, lower for bank accounts and balance transfers
- Pros
- Probably your best bet for micro-transactions
- A good choice for payments for physical goods
- Cons
- I don't know enough about the system to say for sure
Problem
It would be very useful to have feedback on the various API and services that let you bill the customers, so it's possible to compare : - Security; - Quality of API; - Commercial reliability; - Number of languages that can use it; - General usage of them; - Ease of set up; - Economic price; - Technical price. I thinking here of course of PayPal, Google Checkout but bank credit card based systems as well.