Billing is one of those things no one wants to work on because it has nothing to do with your core business, but the inevitability that your app actually has to make money forces you to worry about it at some point.
There are a number of problems when building a billing system that you’ll have to think about before proceeding:
- site integration or third party
- dealing with credit card storage
- handling subscriptions
- selecting a gateway and merchant
Each of these bullets will determine how you setup your billing system, and I’ll be addressing them one at a time how we did it on FamSpam.
I originally wrote this as one massive article, but I’m guilty of losing focus quickly, so I thought it would be more effective if I divided it up and spent some time explaining each section in depth.
One final disclaimer is that a lot of this is opinion-based and you’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong, but let’s keep it civil.
Site integration
Chris and I decided from the get-go that we weren’t interested in redirecting our customers to a third party site to enter in their credit card info.
The first problem is services like Paypal and Amazon FPS require accounts. We already asked them to signup to use FamSpam, why would we ask them to signup for another service just so they could paid to use ours? Adding a Paypal payment option in the future to provide our customers more flexibility is a real possibility, but it was important for us to support credit cards first.
Reason number two is that being able to integrate your billing form looks extremely professional and allows you to organize the page however you wish (as long as the merchant’s guidelines are met). I’m certainly biased, but I think FamSpam’s billing page is the bee’s knees.
The last reason is that I’ve heard recently of intermittent problems with Paypal’s service. Issues can arise with any service, but you’d think Paypal is a site you could count on.
Any breakdowns in communication between your service, the merchant, and the customer is scary stuff. Building a solid rapport with our merchant (how easy would it be for you to email Paypal’s CEO?) has made me feel immensely more secure that if a billing situation were to arise that it would be diagnosed and corrected quickly.
Stop by tomorrow for Dynamite’s next installment of ‘Billing on Brain.’
