In your experience which are the best recurring payment solution and merchant account providers in Asia?
What would you think are the key criteria to choose a recurring billing solutions provider? (with most Asian currencies)
Based on what I found in my search so far, I noted the following.
PayPal does provide recurring payment services in Asia - but customer support is as bad as it is elsewhere with PayPal around the world and with the additional risk of getting blocked for >5% of refunds.
PCI Compliance is absolutely necessary on the part of provider.
Based on initial search found "Money Bookers" but not sure how good their service is - seem to be able to transact in 200 countries so far.
Your experiences (good experiences & warnings) in dealing with recurring billing providers and merchant accounts will be helpful to choose for my implementation.
TechCrunch recently featured SaaSy which seems to fit your criteria pretty well: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/17/online-subscription-billing-is-still-a-hassle-saasy-aims-to-change-that/
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I'm creating a multi-vendor marketplace, where sellers will sign up through Stripe Connect to receive funds. We will programmatically be paying out to the accounts after orders are finalized.
I've been reading about the differences between Express and Standard accounts, but have two questions.
It says "Fraud and dispute liability" for standard is with the User, whereas for Express is with the Platform. What exactly does this mean, and how should I be considering the tradeoffs?
It sounds like Standard is higher complexity for vendors to manage, as opposed to Express. Like a more complex interface? Is Express lower barrier of entry for vendors?
Any help is appreciated! And if you would recommend one approach over the other, I'd be eager to hear it. Thanks!
I recommend giving this guide a careful read. The main thing is that Standard accounts are just "normal" Stripe accounts that are connected to the platform. So, the account holder will have access to a full-fledged dashboard. All objects, charges, and liability lies with that account in direct charges. An Express account is a lighter version of the Standard account experience. The dashboard isn't as comprehensive, and the recommended fund flow is destination charges, which means that all objects (Customer, Subscription, PaymentIntent, etc.) are created on the Platform account and funds are transferred to the Express account on payment. Liability lies with the platform in this scenario. You will have to weight the pros/cons of both to decide.
I develop and host a SaaS business that bills most customers directly, and that is a normal basic use-case with Stripe.
However, I also have a reseller that handles the billing relationship for those mutual customers. Since I host the SaaS service, all signups and subscription changes run through my software, and I'd like to use Stripe to track those customers, and create an invoice for each one of what the reseller owes us for them. Then I'd like to be able to charge the reseller's credit card once to pay for all those customers' invoices in one transaction. Is that possible?
Stripe Connect seems to serve the general need for handling these types of multi-party transactions. But I don't want to require the reseller to use Stripe to bill their own customers.
It seems maybe it could work if I created a single Stripe customer for the reseller, and then create a subscription for each of the reseller's customers under the reseller's customer resource. But it's not the canonical way of doing it, and I think I'd prefer a Stripe customer resource for each actual customer.
Although it might seem I could just collect payment from the reseller, and then mark all the customer invoices as paid offline but that seems it would double book revenue. I definitely don't want that!
I'm hoping someone might have a suggestion about the best way to accomplish this.
Thanks.
These types of questions are probably better suited for the Stripe support team, as they’ll be able to advise you on your business model and if there are any edge cases or unknowns you should be aware of: https://support.stripe.com/contact
we are developing a SaaS (node.js) and struggling how we could manage our subscriptions and billing. First idea was Stripe, but there are limitations like no PayPal Integration, not covering all tax rules in Europe etc.
Is there a solution in node so we could integrate it seamless in our product? something like:
- subscription management
- provides payment cia Stripe, PayPal, amazon Pay
- creates invoices
- compliant to european tax law (reverse charge etc)
Any idea? I asked google (and other engines;)), no result.. there are so many saas build up on node, can't imagine there's no solution
best
Felix
I'm assisting in development of a backend for a painting service that works with many contractors across the US. We've been using Stripe, but the business has been paying the contractors using their bank's ACH service add-on which takes 3-5 days and has to be done manually.
Balanced seems like it's Stripe + next-day ACH payouts with a great API, automating everything. Is this an accurate description of the service? I'm confused why you'd ever use Stripe over Balanced in that case. This is assuming it's also a merchant account + payment gateway like Stripe if I'm reading correctly.
Still wrapping my head around how to best make this work. Thanks everyone.
Stripe:
Charge cards
ACH payouts
Recurring billing
Webhooks
OAuth merchant signup
2.9% + 30¢ per charge
Holds funds for 7 days before you can pay out
Charges in USD or CAD
Balanced:
Authorize and charge cards
ACH payouts
ACH debits
Fully API driven merchant signup
Escrow account
Recurring billing
Webhooks
2.9% + 30¢ per charge, 25¢ per ACH credit (volume pricing calculator)
Funds are available immediately for payouts (vs Stripe's 7 day rolling reserve)
Charges in USD
In a nutshell the fundamental difference is that Stripe focuses on bringing money in to your account, Balanced focuses on bringing money in, holding it until an order to fulfilled, and paying out to your merchants.
You can use Stripe to collect money and Balanced to pay out easily enough, the biggest problem you'll run into is that there will be a liquidity problem as you have to transfer funds from your Stripe to Balanced before you can pay out or create a float of 7 days.
Stripe is also great if you have sub-agents or affiliates that you want to have run the sale, but where you take a percentage of the total charge as well. We recently implemented this for a cause oriented site that supports the collection of donations for smaller and more personal causes. It is one of the more interesting features of the Stripe API. Sub accounts can be created on the fly and activated via a simple email validation creating a one-stop shop for configuring online affiliate programs.
Both are good for specific things, for example balanced will let you collect money from groups in a single pot (in their escrow), and then pay it out. Stripe is good for automated billing.
Stripe is a established company that has a polished interface and support. Balanced is a fly-by-night.
I have one site with Balanced and one with Stripe Connect, and this is the defining difference.
Balanced changed their API and completely broke all transactions.
They didn't even send out an email. Never happened with Stripe.
Balanced once "held up our site for review". Our marketplace went down with no notice or email. (And no explanation when I emailed them, just a response it was being held).
balanced.js can take 10-15 seconds to load, causing the page to hang (we implemented lazy loading just for balanced, but the page is not always ready when needed).
IRC support: Balanced has ~40 inactive users and ~10 users online ATM [in the middle of the U.S. night there are no user, and the inactive users have no AI personality]. Stripe has at least 100 active users, and I seem to be able to get an answer whenever I need to.
etc.
Balanced has one killer feature - your users can sign up and start selling immediately, they don't need to validate themselves to sell, only to receive money.
They are more likely to follow through if it's easy to get into the system. But the risks are real, and should not be ignored.
Also, if it matters, the fact that Stripe can accept payments in multiple currencies can be a killer feature as well.
I have a client who has content that he wants to publish on the web (and potentially for iPad). He wants the viewer to pay to subscribe for the content.
Is there a service out there I can integrate with to for handling the accounts and collecting the monthly subscription fee (using credit cards or something else)?
There are several services out there that can help you with this - Recurly (where I work), Chargify, CheddarGetter, Spreedly, etc. These services handle the recurring billing aspect, customer management, email communication, following up with failed payments, etc. You'll also need a payment gateway (to process the cards) and a merchant account (for the payment gateway to deposit the funds into).
Authorize.net and PayPal both have recurring billing features, but the logic for upgrading/downgrading accounts is not there or difficult to use, and you'll still need to handle customer communication for failed payments and other actions.
You need to use a payment gateway here, which will be responsible for handling the transaction between your site and the many different payment networks. There are a lot of operations happening in between, so you might want to check out the wikipedia article for a step by step information on that.
We personally use authorize.net in our company for many of its advantages, some of which are:
It has an API that makes it easy to integrate with any language.
It is a trusted brand already, proven by the number of merchants that use them.
It is secure.
It provides the service with a reasonable price.
Most of major payment gateway providers do support recurring billing or subscription plans, paypal,authorize.net etc, most of the time you have to log in to your account admin console and configure a plan, and send the payment plan id with the payment request to the payment gateway. some payment gateway providers, like Braintree supports to create recurring billing plans dynamically and assign users to that plan at the run time it self, how ever it's always better to go for a local payment gateway provider or a payment gateway which provides low fees, if your preferred payment gateway provider is not supporting recurring billing anther options is to store cc details on the server and and handle it your self but it's a great risk to store cc details on the server, and you will have to follow PCI standards and it's hard.