Pivotal Labs recently invited Recurly to present a TechTalk to a room of developers. Developers are smart people and can quickly figure out how to run credit card transactions using the numerous payment gateway APIs out there. So, we decided to a range of topics that you won’t learn from reading documentation — advice you’ll only learn from experience.
More than once, I’ve underestimated the efforts required to create a billing system. I have yet to find a start-up that budgeted correctly for the time and effort to integrate subscription billing. If your startup is new to subscription billing, there are a few key problems you’ll soon encounter. Knowing about these issues will help you budget your development resources appropriately and help you evaluate your recurring billing options.
If you’re launching a new site and want to accept credit cards, you’ll soon learn how many companies are involved in every transaction. And, once you run into the first few declined credit cards, you’ll learn about a few companies that didn’t seem to be there before. This article describes the companies that are involved in every credit card transaction.
Every Merchant Account provider has a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page yet they always leave out the really important questions. Yes, you absolutely need to know about the fees, supported gateways, address verification, Discover & AmEx, etc. However, there’s another class of questions that you’ll never know to ask until you run into a problem. [...]