Recurring billing

Need recurring billing solution with good conversion

[tdierks]

I'm looking for a subscription/recurring billing solution which can handle credit card numbers directly.

We think we'll have much better conversion to subscriptions if we can offer the customer a form to fill out with CC#, etc., right on the same page as the sales pitch, rather than clicking off of our site to start a multi-page process to get their billing details.

We'd also like the provider to handle recurring billing for us, either automatically or on our request; we'd prefer to avoid having to store the credit card numbers in our own database.

Is there a provider who offers all of this?
- The ability to directly accept an HTTPS POST with all the necessary transaction details and process the payment (a confirmation screen is OK with us, but we'd prefer to avoid a multi-page wizard interface).
- The ability to then do billing in the future, based on some customer ID#; either automatic or on our instruction.

[bcc1234]

If you are located in the US, check out authorize.net gateway. They will do recurring payments with any merchant account.

[tdierks]

Authorize.net technical support claims that they don't have a recurring billing solution. Can you provide more details?

[bcc1234]

I don't know the details as I don't use that feature.
But they do have something called "Recurring Billing Transaction". I just never used it so you might want to ask the support if that's what you need.

[tdierks]

My (vague) understanding is that this is something you are supposed to use when you are submitting a recurring billing transaction, but you've still got to do the transaction every month (or whatever), which means you've still got to have the credit card details in-hand.

They did indicate that they can re-run a transaction based on the transaction #; I'm asking again to make sure that would fit my needs.

[jamesa]

yea, my understanding is that's just an info field. They don't do recurring as far as I know, unfortunately.

[kjs50]

I still haven't had any luck in finding anything. Is there a shopping cart out there that has something like this available?

[dkubb]

I just finished converting a client's shopping cart to support Verisign's Pay Flow Recurring Billing System. I found the interface to be quite good, and supported nearly everything they needed to do.

The system takes care of credit card storage and will perform recurring billing on your behalf. You can even specify how many times to retry a failed charge, and how many days to wait before retrying. If there's still a problem, the system will send you an email; otherwise its pretty hands off.

Keep in mind I just completed the switch-over and haven't used it in the "real world" yet. Still, during my testing it seemed better than other recurring billing systems I've worked with in the past.

[kjs50]

Thanks for the info. Does the recurring occur automatically, or do you have some control on it? Does your cart generate the orders once they reoccur? I would need to pass it to a fulfillment house every month.

[Fighting Falcon]

Hi

Worldpay have quite a sophisticated recurring payments package called FuturePay. We did quite a large project for a customer selling broadband/domains/hosting services using this facility.The system is in fact two different " contracts" working back to back. You takes a large initial amount covering such things as setup fees, hardware costs, etc and then a regular amount starting on a future start date. Its quite flexible but takes some time to become familiar with the integration.

Hope that helps. :)

Cheers

Fighting Falcon