eCommerce Question

[Shikarnov]

Hi all,

I've been designing sites for many years, but they've always been fairly straight-forward branding sites. On occasion, a client has had a need to sell something - like a single white paper or something that could be easily handled with PayPal...

Well, now I have a product idea that I want to develop, and for the first time I'm faced with the idea that accounts will need to be setup which offer recurring billing (problem One), and which will need to allow backwards communication with the payment processor so that failed renewals automatically terminate a subscription (problem Two).

Does anybody know of any books or sites that can help me wrap my head around these processes?

Thanks!

Z

[Robert Maxwell]

I see no one has replied.

Basically, this is not the kind of thing you can do totally yourself. I believe most merchant accounts/payment processing companies allow what you are talking about. Your best bet is to shop around, googling "merchant account" and "payment processor" and see which one has the features you want at a price you find reasonable.

The whole "failed renewal" thing is pretty standard on recurring billing arrangements. Any billing system should be able to tell you when a payment failed and then you can trigger the deactivation of the account on your end. Usually, the way they work is to generate an invoice on your end, submit the payment request to the processor/merchant account, then get a notification back as to whether it paid or not. Multiple attempts, user management of card info, etc. is all pretty standard, I think.

[Shikarnov]

Hi. Thanks for the reply. I ended up going with these guys: http://saasy.com/

They do everything I need, and don't charge any upfront or monthly fees -- which, for my purposes, is perfect. The transactional cost is a little high, but that won't be a big issue for me until this thing really takes off.