Sigh. I wish someone would solve this problem already. I mean, some startup to do to payments what heroku did to rails deployment.
All the recurring-billing systems only solve half the problem: the logic for recurring-billing, but it is still fairly problematic to get the other pieces in place. There should be a way to collect payments on your site without having to setup a merchant account, et. al. Does anyone know what the regulatory hurdles to something like this are?
We're working on it. The hurdles are state money transmitter licenses and federal laws including but not limited to the USA PATRIOT Act and the Bank Secrecy Act, plus ad hoc regulations that come from the U.S. Treasury / FinCEN.
Seems really expensive (5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per transaction).
I've been getting setup with Stripe. They just lowered their rates to 3.5% (from 5%) plus $0.30 per transaction. Good API and no other fees. Seems great so far...
Stripe looks promising but based on their FAQ they are available only to US based companies/persons for now, so they are not an option I can consider, at least in the near future.
That looks very interesting.
Receiving payments is such a huge hurdle for small projects outside of the U.S. (for example, PayPal doesn't provide Website Payments Pro in Ireland, banks are pretty difficult for new businesses, etc)
Saasy looks like it might work.
All the recurring-billing systems only solve half the problem: the logic for recurring-billing, but it is still fairly problematic to get the other pieces in place. There should be a way to collect payments on your site without having to setup a merchant account, et. al. Does anyone know what the regulatory hurdles to something like this are?