Recurring Payments

[ymadh]

I have a client that wants to setup a recurring payment system. What I am not clear on is this

- are there any merchants that will do some sort of system notification if the payment fails so that the items don't get shipped or does that have to be done manually?

- also, we'd like to have it automatically sell the item back should they choose to, so are there any merchants that will allow a negative recurring billing system?

Thanks!
amy

[Corey Bryant]

What would be the negative? Are you wanting to refund the consumer money? That's possible - but usually you need to call the processor / gateway to have them implement it

-Corey

[ymadh]

Yes its an automatic credit every so often.

Any ideas on IPN like systems other than paypal? To notify the server of processed payments?

Amy

[rocknbil]

This is actually a pretty important point - "an IPN system like payPal." If a recurring billing system is in place, there should be some method of connecting with the website from the payment processor and updating database information, as in a subscription renewal.

To my knowledge, payPal is the only processor that offers an IPN system - recent discussion here [webmasterworld.com]. I find this completely amazing that no other processors have this sort of feature in their interface.

An important point in that previous discussion is it's *easy enough* to set up a system to automatically query the gateway for a payment, but to do that you must store the information on your site. To do that, you must be PCI compliant - which is not so easy.