[LRUG] Best Payments solution for Rails app?

Tom Taylor tom at tomtaylor.co.uk
Mon Feb 4 05:45:39 PST 2013


Our experience with PayPal has been reasonably positive, especially recently. They have a new CEO, keen to keep pace with the new upstarts.

We *are* shipping physical goods <http://www.newspaperclub.com>, so that makes things more straight forward. We put a decent amount of money through them, >£500k/yr, and have absolutely no delay or hold on funds received. When we call we get through to a knowledgable person in Ireland.

We're about to add a merchant account to the mix, if only to build our own credit worthiness and provide some resilience, but I'd argue PayPal is a good place to start.

On 4 Feb 2013, at 12:58, Alex Reis <alex at alexmreis.com> wrote:

> Whatever you do just steer clear of PayPal. Last client that asked for paypal ended up switching to Worldpay after much pain to get their account approved. Worldpay has a very decent system, though you can't API just your way to recurring payments, need to use their own pages to sign the user up, which are minimally customisable. Heard good things about Realex as well.
> 
> Also do make sure you or our client's account is all set up and ready to go before jumping in on the project, otherwise you might end up spending quite some time and money only to find out that you've been rejected by that particular gateway and need to start over. Make a test transaction as step #1, not as a verification step in the end.
> 
> 
> Alexandre M. Reis
> http://alexmreis.com
> +32 484 77 99 27
> 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Gabe da Silveira <gabe at websaviour.com> wrote:
> If you're not selling a physical product absolutely do not use PayPal.  Braintree is good and can work with many different currencies although you will require merchant accounts in said currency.  Of course Stripe is the best if you can limit yourself to the US/Canada for now.  The rumor is UK is in development or at least on their radar.
> 
> If you go with Braintree or Stripe then you could avoid the overhead of ActiveMerchant which ends up being sort of a lowest-commond-denominator solution.  The idea is that it abstracts the payment details so you can switch gateways easily, but in practice the surface area of the payment processing interface isn't that big anyway, and if you design your application correctly than I think the precision and clarify of using a specific payment systems library outweighs the small benefit of ActiveMerchant's abstraction.  That is assuming the libraries are well-maintained, which Braintree's and Stripe's are.
> 
> -gabe
> 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 12:42 PM, David Burrows <david at designsuperbuild.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Got a project where I need to setup one-off and recurring payments from around the world, mainly US & Europe - was wondering if anyone had any current recommendations? I've used active_merchant / Paypal in the past but Braintree has a lot of good buzz and seems like a more robust solution, esp. considering PayPal's recent form. 
> 
> Cheers,
> David
> 
> -- 
> David Burrows
> 079 1234 2125
> @dburrows
> 
> http://www.designsuperbuild.com/ | @dsgnsprbld
> 
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