Advice for setting up recurring billing?

Question

I have a bit of experience setting up online payment systems that accept credit card numbers and then pass them over to a gateway for a one time payment.

However, I now need to setup a system that can handle automatic recurring billing - where a user provides their credit card number and is automatically billed on a monthly basis from that point forward.

I am wondering what the best way to approach something like this is? (I notice that Paypal Payflow Pro does have a recurring billing feature, but I am a bit unclear on how it works.)

Any advice on the best method / service / gateway for implementing recurring billing? If possible, I would greatly prefer to avoid keeping a local record of credit card numbers for repeat processing.

Thanks (in advance) for your help.

Answer 1

There's a midpoint between building your own recurring billing and Auth.net's ARB or PayPal's recurring billing (both of which have their disadvantages). There are a number of providers that handle all the details and complexities of recurring billing, and simply report the charges to your payment gateway for processing at the interval you determine.

The most critical piece to look at is which services to credit card tokenization and support credit card data portability - this will ensure that your customer data isn't locked in with a billing provider and that you can take it with you if you choose another provider in the future. This also means that these providers store the customer credit card data for you, so you can greatly reduce your PCI compliance.

Take a look at Recurly (Disclaimer: I manage their customer and technical support) and Braintree. Both services will handle your recurring billing, credit card tokenization, and support credit card data portability.

Answer 2

Recurring billing is easy to handle and offload to a third party if your recurring amount is constant (e.g. the amount a user pays never changes in amount or frequency). Services like Authorize.Net's Automated Recurring Billing (ARB) and Paypal Payflow Pro recurring billing allow you to have those companies handle the actual recurring payments which means you don't have to store credit card information on your servers or even do anything once the subscription is created through their APIs.

If your subscriptions will vary in terms of cost or frequency, you'll need to use a service like Authorize.Net's Customer Information Manager (CIM) to create payment profiles for your customers. Basically you're storing credit card information on Authorize.Net's servers and whenever you want to make a subscription payment you tell Authorize.Net to charge the amount due to that payment profile. The drawback to this is you essentially have to build your own subscription system.