Merchant Accounts & Payment Gateways

We reach a lot of small businesses and software developers who’ve never needed to know anything about merchant accounts and payment gateways, so I wrote up a personal blog entry a few weeks ago that explains most of what you need to know - from what the pieces do to where to get them.

If you’d like to learn more about merchant accounts and payment gateways, in general, please check out Merchant Accounts & Payment Gateways… Keeping the Grass Green!.

Why We Removed PayPal WPP

Back in April, were excited to add support for PayPal Website Payments Pro (“WPP”) for Chargify merchants in the US, UK, and Canada. WPP provides an additional and in some ways easier path for startups and small businesses to get a payment gateway and merchant account in one package.

Since we entered private beta, one of the most requested features has been PayPal merchant services support. PayPal’s Website Payments products ease the pain of finding a gateway and merchant account, making it simple to start charging customer cards.

This week, we introduced support for PayPal Website Payments Pro in the United States. Next week, we will add support for PayPal accounts in Canada and the United Kingdom. We also plan to support PayPal Payflow Pro in the near future.

This is a guest-post from Sean Harper, co-founder of TransFS.  He is a zealot about making sure business owners get a fair shake from their financial services providers.

1. Know what your requirements are and find a processor that has lots of experience with those requirements.
The worst credit card processing outcomes occur when the business owner doesn’t screen the processors that don’t have experience fulfilling that requirement. Fortunately, there are lots of processors that are experienced dealing with SaaS and web services companies and providing the gateway (auth.net or otherwise) that they need.

As a startup, we face many of the classic trade-offs between getting things done quickly and getting them done the best way possible. The right answer is usually somewhere in the middle. Since we’re dealing with our customers’ money and business transactions, we err on the side of doing things slowly and methodically, especially on core issues.

GATEWAY COVERAGE

Hundreds of people want us to add other payment gateways. This is absolutely true for people outside the USA, because they can’t use our currently-supported gateway, Authorize.net, which means they can’t use Chargify. And that’s a shame!

We’ve been gathering info since November on what gateways people want. In parallel, we’ve been investigating ways to add gateways - quick ways vs best ways.

If you’re a developer, you might ask why we don’t write code for each of the different gateways’ APIs. Especially with things like ActiveMerchant (in Rails), we should be able to add gateways very quickly. Yes, but…

Welcome to the Bullring, the blog dedicated entirely to empowering entrepreneurs and developers to start and run successful businesses based on recurring revenue models. 

Let’s lay it out there. Recurring billing is a pain in the ass. Credit cards get declined for a million different reasons, you have to deal with upgrades/downgrades, proration, refunds, credits, customer communication, fraudulent transactions, and the list goes on. It’s no small task to implement a system that handles all of the potential pitfalls of billing on a recurring basis.