I can find a good payment solution for my site and recurring payments. I've been looking around but can't find any great way of doing it.
On our site our customers are spending virtual credits. The charge their account with new credits when their credits are out. We want to provide them with an automatic refill functionality but we do not want to deal with all the PCI-DSS problems that comes with it.
Basically I'm looking for the following functionality:
The payment provider should expose (secure hosted pages) where the customer provides all credit card details.
My site loads the hosted pages with some customerID (to be able to map tokenID with customerID in the last step).
When the customer has registered his credit card details the payment provider sends a notification to my site that credit card details has been tokenized with a tokenID for customerID.
In the future I charge my customer with an API call:
API::charge(currency,amount, tokenID);
Is there any payment providers out there that can do this?
You can't use a normal recurring billing system if the amounts change from cycle to cycle. The best you can do is use a service like Authorize.Net's Customer Information Manager (CIM) to store the credit card and billing information for you and then you create your own scheduling engine that charges against the payment method you have stored for them using CIM. CIM also allows you to make off-cycle payments at any time as well.
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I have a subscription service for which free trials are allowed before signing up for the full payed service. I want to ask the customer to provide credit card details before gaining access to the free trial, to prevent abuse of the trial.
I'm using Stripe to handle payments so that I don't have to deal with storage of any sensitive payment information. This free trial scenario would seem to be very common, so I assumed there would be some way to query a card to make sure that it hasn't been used to sign up already. Just some API call that would accept the card number etc. and return a boolean.
I haven't seen anything like in the API docs. I know that fingerprints of cards are accessible after creating a card source, so is it advisable to store them myself and query them? Or have I missed something in the docs?
Just to be clear... I'm not looking to search a card for a particular customer. I know I can iterate over the cards to do that, but I'd have to iterate over the cards of every customer to accomplish what I want, which is not feasible.
Here you probaly want to contact the support team and suggest this as a new feature.
A possibility is the fingerprint you mention, in my opinion this would be the way i would do it too.
One single card should never be associated with one customer in a platform.
No, there is no way to check whether a credit card is used for another customer or not. And there shouldn't be. Because a customer has right to use his/her single credit card to maintain more than accounts.
You can easily integrate trial feature of a Subscription in Stripe which is best way to implement Trial feature using Stripe. If any customer's payment failed after trial expired then you will be notified by Stripe.
And Stripe and any other payment gateway is not advise to store any card info due to security issue.
I'm looking for a way to charge my customer after a request was successfully accepted.
To explain it further. I'm developing a marketplace where a private seller can sell his products to private customers. But the customer can only "request" the product and only when the seller accepts his conditions a deal is made.
Now comes the question that I have. Is it possible that the user is paying for the request but is only charged when the request is accepted?
If a request fails the charge has never been done or gets a full refund (but without the loss of transactions fees).
I've seen some couple of websites that use credit cards for that case.
If you look at credit cards as a payment method they are usually a pull-based, reusable and synchronous method of payment. This means that, after capturing the customer’s card details, you can debit arbitrary amounts from the customer’s card without them having to take any additional action and there is immediate confirmation about the success or failure of a payment.
So that is why you can charge someone after a specific period of time.
But in Germany, we don't use credit cards that often. Only pushed-based transactions like Sepa/Sofort/iDeal. Would it be possible to "delay" payments with these methods?
This should be possible. I'm not sure what payment processor you are using/want to use or what is available in Germany but I assume this would be possible with many of them. Probably some useful things to search for that might be similar to what you want would be saving payment methods for later, managing subscriptions, and tokenizing credit cards.
Stripe for example allows you to save credit cards for later under a customer record and then charge a customer later. https://stripe.com/docs/saving-cards
Braintree has recurring billing https://developers.braintreepayments.com/guides/recurring-billing/overview and a vault for storing payment methods https://articles.braintreepayments.com/control-panel/vault/overview.
I am working on a software that is to be used by businesses which make about $0.5mil revenue per year. I would like to incorporate into the software the option for my users to accept card payments from their clients. So far it seems I have the following options:
Manage multiple merchant accounts on behalf of my clients, however this has a few drawbacks. I would, for example, like to charge some small fee to cover the costs (about 0.1%) which I cannot accept if the payment to my user doesn't go through some stage that I can control where I can deduct the fee and send it my way. Also, about 50% of the mentioned revenue is paid for by credit or debit cards so a volume of $250,000 might not be enough to cover the fees set by the account provider.
Send everything through a merchant account that I control and then distribute the funds to the users. This, however, seems like a very small scale solution at best with the average number of payments per user per day being around 15.
The end result should be that the user enters a price in the software, this gets sent to a card reader where the user's client inserts their card and makes the payment. The amount charged includes all the fees associated. The amount paid will then be sent to some merchant account where my fee will be sent to me and the merchant fee will be deducted, the rest will be sent to my user's account. The whole point being that the user doesn't have to bother with setting up merchant account or card reader and simply gets a card reader from us which connects to the software and can immediately accept payments.
I sincerely hope I am missing something but I would appreciate any help with finding a way how to charge clients of my users and take some small fee.
So as it turns out, the best way to do this is using Stripe after all. If anyone is ever concerned, this is how I solved the problem.
Stripe is currently rolling out Managed Accounts of their Stripe Connect which can be used to effectively manage Stripe accounts for my customers. Therefore, once a user registers for my payment program, I create a managed account for them without the user knowing at all. For incoming Stripe payments I can then use the destination property as the id of the account where the money should go and specify an application fee which will be charged to my own account.
From there on the only problem to solve is that Stripe only supports online payments which can be overcome by using for example Payworks, however so far their service has been pretty terrible so this may be a weak point in the system.
This is the scenario I expect the system behave:
I have a platform where users can register and store their credit card information online, and with specific user's action, system automatically settles payment.
Of course, user expect automatic payment system as we said so when they enter their card information, and the purpose of this is to simplify the process when they decided to pay for something.
My question is this:
I found that Amazon saves user's card information when they purchased some products then user doesn't need to put all the card information again but just select from the list of cards he used and with one click, it finishes payment.
Also, in price line, I found that it automatically settles after bid accepted.
So I tried to find the provider or payment gateway company that Priceline or Amazon provide, and tried to find the way to implement the system at least, but couldn't find any. What I have found so far were like, using paypal, and it requires user to have paypal id
I'm doing this in PHP, can anybody give me some clue please?
Thanks in advance.
You should be able to do this with most payment gateways that support recurring payments.
Typically what you would do for new customers is capture their card details 'as normal' (via the payment gateway). The payment gateway will return a token id which you then store against the customer record
Next time that customer makes a payment you can submit the tokenised card number to the payment gateway
Since you mentioned Amazon, you might want to look at their payment service API: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/
I am using Stripe for online payments but also users can pay offline (cash or check). I want to centralize all my invoices/charges in one place (Stripe).
I am not sure if I can add offline payments (cash or check) to stripe or not. I guess I can if I created customers, invoices, charges with livemode=false for my live keys.
Is this feasible and will Stripe accept having some (customers, invoices and charges) with livemode=false and others with livemode=true?
If yes, should I fill fake credit card info or should I set it as nil?
Stripe does not allow you to create a Subscription on a Customer if you don't have a credit card setup. More accurately, it does not allow you to create a subscription if a customer does not have a way to pay for the next invoice. So for offline payments, you could update the 'account_balance' on the customer to have a negative value equal to the amount the customer wired (credits). Stripe will then allow you to create a subscription for the customer because it knows that the customer has enough account balance to pay for the next invoice. This post has more details.
We don't currently support offline payments, so you'll want to look at a separate accounting system for those payments.
That said, it's totally understandable that you'd want to keep this data in one place. You might be interested in using our webhooks system to offer live updates to your accounting system without directly touching the code that creates the charge in Stripe.