Subscription Service Auto-Renew

Is there anything I need to know, legal or not?

[adrock31]

I have a site with about 1,500 members signed up for a yearly paid membership to access a database of information. Most of them renew, so I know they find value in their membership. I also have a lot of valuable free information available at my site, and it draws a lot of new visitors every month via search. I'm trying to figure out how to convert more of those visitors to paid members and I'm considering offering a month-by-month membership, with auto-renewal.

Are there any legal obstacles to offering this? And are there any specific things I need to state, do, clear in order to be able to charge someone's credit card monthly?

(I know that WebmasterWorld is unable to offer legal advice, so if someone at least knows where to point me, so that I can find some of these answers, I'd be very grateful).

Also, once this is in effect, any suggestion on how I handle expiring credit cards in the months and years to come?

Thanks in advance.

[rocknbil]

I have a customer that specifically does this. He has his auto-renewal policy clearly displayed in the user agreement, on signup and by a link from anywhere on the site. Although I suggested making it an option to his users he decided against that and apparently has had little trouble over it.

As for how it's managed, this one's trickier. For his particular gateway, it requires storage of the CC info server-side and we had to do some major tricks involving gpg to safely store the CC info in an encoded form in his database. A cron job runs daily that executes a script which looks up the expireds, attempts to silently post to the gateway, and if approved signs them up for another period. In either case an email is dispatched to keep the member informed and a daily report goes to the admin.

All this was on the customer's command, so as for legalities, talk to a few credit card companies, your gateway people, and of course your lawyer. :-)

[adrock31]

Perfect, thanks.

That's a good idea to email the customer after renewal. Definitely gives the appearance of honesty and transparency, versus just charging away month by month and hoping people forget to notice; like AOL.