I’m a little bit late on this one, but it’s still worth mentioning in case you’re looking to create a recurring billing system without storing sensitive credit card data. Authorize.net now allows you to set up recurring billing subscriptions via an API. Previously, Authorize.net had a recurring billing system in place, but there was no way to programmatically create or edit billing information, which meant everything had to be done manually. You can now create subscriptions, specify a time period for trials, modify subscriptions, and delete subscriptions without ever logging into their system. To learn more about how to hook up your application to Authorize.net, check out their integration center.
It’s worth mentioning that PaySimple also has a fantastic recurring billing API in place, and if you’re not currently tied to another system, they’re definitely worth checking out. Their API does seem to be a little more robust than Authorize.net, and they can also handle the process of setting up a merchant account for you.
We were using Authorize.net’s ARB system before they released this super-helpful functionality for our subscription business, and I have to say it wasn’t pretty. More troubling was that they didn’t have any way for us to migrate our customer data to a new solution when the time came. This is the main drawback of storing your customer information directly on these services; your customers are held hostage by the billing storage provider. Moreover, Authorize.net’s package with the merchant account had strange practices where some of our funds wouldn’t be paid out to us as they held it in a “holding pool” of some sort. Overall, we were not happy with them and wouldn’t recommend going down their ARB route.
We’ve since moved on to TrustCommerce and their programmable interface has made things so much smoother for us.
Thanks for adding that, Danny. We’ve never had problems with money being held in a ‘holding pool’, but I definitely don’t like the sound of not being in control of the data. I have spoken with paysimple and they said that I can take the data and leave at anytime, so that’s a pretty big plus for them.
It may also be worth noting that Authorize.net’s ARB doesn’t take a currency, so non-US payments are impossible.
I shall investigate your above recommendations