[LRUG] Recurring Payments and subscriptions

[Damien Tanner]

Might be worth adding our setup into the mix. Both Panda (
http://www.pandastream.com/) and Pusher (http://pusherapp.com/ - payment to
be launched shortly) are done using Chargify with PaymentExpress/DPS and
BarclayCard + Amex. Actual card detail entry pages are hosted by Chargify so
there was no PCI compliance we had to do :)

We've found this solution works very well. Chargify is a great company and
they are making great improvements every day. Although PaymentExpress/DPS is
in NZ they are also very smart people and maybe the only payment processor
not full of marking staff in their call centres. Plus they have nice accents
;)

BarclayCard was fairly easy to get a merchant account with as long as you
have some trading history.

I have contacts at all these places (knowing someone helpful BarclayCard is
especially useful). If anyone would like an introduction please let me know.

Cheers,
 [image: Damien Tanner] Damien Tanner - Co-Founder and Director, Panda
+44 (0)20 7099 7486 - pandastream.com -
@pandastream<http://twitter.com/pandastream>  Try our new Realtime web
service:
http://pusherapp.com <pusherapp.com>


On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Glenn Gillen <glenn at rubypond.com> wrote:

> > Working on the basis that people tend to use subscription management
> services (Spreedly etc) with a merchant account, how do people tend to keep
> that in sync with their app?
>
> All the ones I've used expect you to implement an endpoint on your server
> that they can call, and you then take appropriate action. Depending on the
> service it is either a payload with the updated data for a user or it's a
> list of IDs for you to subsequently fetch the latest details for and then
> persist.
>
> > For instance, how do you validate an account locally, and on the sub
> service before save? Do people tend to just let the subscription service
> manage accounts, and keep calling back for info (which could be slow, and is
> a major dependancy) or do people try and stay as far away as possible.
>
> I cache the data locally on signup, update it whenever I get a callback
> from Spreedly, and have a cron job that runs regularly and finds anybody
> that is active but hasn't had their Spreedly data refreshed for 30 days. I
> then occasionally check the admin interface to make sure there haven't been
> any failed calls to my server that I've missed.
>
> The combination seems to cover all the scenarios I care about. I could run
> a monthly sweep over the whole database to update them all, but it seemed
> overkill and prone to problems in the future.
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