Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Recurring Payments and Billing

Our next project, which is still under wraps but will target the Hospitality Industry, will need some sort of electronic payment interface. We're using Java on the backend, but hopefully anyone that we integrate with will have sort of language-agnostic interface.

We're currently looking at several different options, and the key features we're looking for are quite basic:

1. Ability to accept payments for Credit Cards and eChecks
2. Handle recurring payments (for monthly, quarterly, every 6-months, annual, etc...).

Right now, we're in looking at TrustCommerce, PayPal, and Google Checkout as well as the possibility of rolling our own service using Authorize.net. The Business of Software Forum has had some interesting threads about this here, here, and here. Today, Particletree has an article on the process required to sidestep PayPal (and others) and save some money in the process.

We've never tackled online payments directly, usually tackling the payment processing through a third party hosting an eCommerce script, so this should be an interesting task over the next few weeks.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 6:00 PM