Online payment questions

Rails
1

I am looking for some input from people that setup a payment gateway of
some sort.

First of I am curious to the advantages/disadvantages of using paypal vs
other services like braintree gateway offer.

Lastly, I am wondering if anyone has any tips that would help someone
out on their first time. I have found some material on setting up
payments, but it is just the basics of a one time payment. In the real
world you have to deal with cancelled accounts, partial refunds, account
upgrades and other scenarios which require updates to the payment setup.

If anyone could offer a few tips I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

2

Check out the peepcode pdf on active merchant; it walks through a
pretty complete implementation of the braintree gateway. It’ll cost
you $9 but it is well worth it and goes into much more detail than any
of the free online stuff.
http://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf

We started with paypal but switched to braintree for several reasons:

  • Payment provider brand doesn’t need to be exposed. It just looks
    more professional, and you can provide a smoother experience to to
    your customers.
  • Fees can be lower, in some scenarios.
  • Ability to do future charges, credits, subscriptions, etc., without
    having to store the credit card info locally, and without having to
    send the customer to the paypal site to do so.

Michael S.
www.BuildingWebApps.com

On May 8, 7:45 pm, Chris O. [email protected]

3

We use PayPal Website Payments Pro for ease of use and the ability to
accept money directly from other PayPal accounts (some customers view
it almost as “free money” that’s really easy to spend - good for the
merchant!). See this thread for contributions from others:

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/4408cc97824f4e27/0e0a5d096a82da89?lnk=st&q=#0e0a5d096a82da89

With regard to partial refunds, etc., we’re able to do those things
from within the PayPal interface, so I didn’t have to write code for
it - a definite plus.

That being said, if we didn’t have to accept PayPal as a form of
payment (as my manager mandates), I’d probably look into Michael’s
setup above.

-Kyle

4

Michael S. wrote:

Check out the peepcode pdf on active merchant; it walks through a
pretty complete implementation of the braintree gateway. It’ll cost
you $9 but it is well worth it and goes into much more detail than any
of the free online stuff.
http://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf

I have read it. It is pretty basic and doesn’t go over any gotchas. It
is good though.

We started with paypal but switched to braintree for several reasons:

  • Payment provider brand doesn’t need to be exposed. It just looks
    more professional, and you can provide a smoother experience to to
    your customers.

That is what I think. After talking to users of the site it seemed they
liked paypal’s convenience, ie just login and pay, rather than looking
for credit card.

  • Ability to do future charges, credits, subscriptions, etc., without
    having to store the credit card info locally, and without having to
    send the customer to the paypal site to do so.

Does Paypal require you to store the credit card numbers on your
database? If so that is a definite con.

Thanks for the input.