Advice on Platform and Gateway

[Zach Close Shave]

Hi all,

We have been operating our online business for just under 5 months now and starting to gain some traction. However during this period we have had major problems with our current payment gateway and shopping cart. We are using Expression Engine for our platform and PayPal Payment Pro as our payment gateway. We would ultimately like to switch both of these things when we have the funds to do so but since we made a substantial investment into getting these set up we are tied down for the time being.

The main aspect we need in place is the ability to accept recurring payments since we are a subscription service. We do not have many products, only three, each with three pricing categories but we may want to add a few other products as we go forward. Ultimately we just want it to be a clean experience for our customers to sign up and update information and easy for us to manage our shipping aspects. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Also for PayPal we did not need a merchant account to accept card details through them. As setting up a merchant account can be costly and come with monthly fees just to have the account are there other systems better than PayPal to accept payments. We would like to maintain PayPal for people that want to pay through their PayPal accounts but their system for accepting card payments is far from ideal.

Thanks,

Zach

 

[JonathanSEO]

For recurring payment I guess you could stick with Expression Engine and membrr? http://www.membrr.com/

 

[CharityClear]

With regards to gateways, www.paymentbrain.co.uk is a useful and impartial comparison tool.

Marc Kelly

Sales Manager
CharityClear

 

[Ryan McFadyen]

My suggestion would be Wordpress + Woo Commerce + Stripe

Expression Engine is what I'd call overkill for your needs. It's a fantastic bit of kit but it's really geared toward large content based systems and generally the professionals you might need to make changes down the line charge accordingly.

Wordpress on the other hand is extremely widely used, very extendable and has a very large open source community surrounding it. Thousands of sites have been built to do exactly what you want with it and you'll probably never run into a situation where it can't do what you want it to.

Woo Commerce is great for handling products, very well done and makes adapting Wordpress into an eCommerce platform a breeze. It also has a good set of addons that are for handling just what you want, like the recurring payments module that integrates with PayPal Standard by default.

It also integrates well with the Stripe module that is available who charge per transaction just like PayPal standard to give you the alternative payment processor.

All in you're looking at $150 to buy the licenses you need and that's you. Sorted.

 

[LMDServicesUK]

Hi

Cannot advise re your choice of ecommerce engine/shopping cart as not an area I am an expert in, however re your interest in setting up a recurring payment facility, to process your customers payments, the only way you will be able to do this will be to open a conventional Merchant account which supports this facility.

We specialise in delivering e-commerce payment gateways and associated Merchant accounts that will allow you to set up and operate a Recurring Transaction Authority (card equivalent of a Direct Debit) payment facilities.

More over there are a lot more cost effective solutions out there than PayPal Pro, and usually with far better Customer service to boot. I know we are a lot more cost effective for example.

If you would like to find out more as to what is involved please PM me and I will provide you some more information, for when you are in a position to do something you are at least armed with all the details you need to be aware of !

Hope this is of some use to you

Kind regards

Mark
LMD Services

 

[alexlhh]

read this from paypal: PayPal Recurring Payments allows you to bill a buyer for a fixed amount of money on a fixed schedule. Consider the following examples:
A buyer purchases a subscription to a magazine or newsletter from your site and agrees to pay a monthly fee.
A buyer agrees to pay an Internet Service Provider a flat fee on a semi-annual basis to host a website. is it fit your requirements?

 

[CardswitcherUK]

Zach-a bit of a partial answer to your question.......
When you do seek an alternative to Paypal for card acceptance, have a look on our website for price comparison across merchant accounts. Our providers also provide gateways but if none of those meet your technical requirements, you can easily integrate any merchant account into just about any gateway.

If you are trading any level of card volume (say >£10k per year) you will find the merchant account transaction fees will be the bulk of your cost and for this product it makes sense to shop on price.

We give instant quotes with no sales calls. PM me if we can help further.

Regards
Stephen

 

[antropy]

I think Expression Engine probably isn't the most flexible of shopping carts, take a look at OpenCart, www.opencart.com.

There are various extensions that can handle recurring payments, have a read through the descriptions of these, the screenshots and demos:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=8083
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=10585
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=9890
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=6033
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=4962

We'd be able to customise any of those for you to work exactly how you need it to.

Paul

 

[LMDServicesUK]

Hi Paul

Very useful post, although I note the majority of the plug ins only work with PayPal.. Are you are of any other plugins that will work with other payment gateways ?

The reason I ask is that under the Recurring Payments UK Guidelines, as issued by APACS in the UK any recurring payments have to be processed through a separate isolated Merchant account and the initial transaction has to be set up using the primary Merchant account processing tool (e.g. the payment gateway management tool). Am I right in thinking these plugins would then integrate directly to the Payment gateways ?

Rgds

mark

 

[antropy]

Thank you.

The last one is Stripe and I didn't post this one which is 2checkout:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=6719

This one is PayPal Standard which may mean you'd need to set up the recurring payment on the PayPal site itself:
http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=11796

Apart from that they are all PayPal Pro.

I wasn't aware of that requirement - some the ones that I looked at above have selling points such as managing everything from the extension rather than PayPal so I'm not sure how they relate to those guidelines.

Are they just guidelines or are they law?

 

[LMDServicesUK]

Hi Paul

They are the guidelines that the Card Schemes insist on when operating Recurring Payments, so whilst not a legal requirement if you are not implementing them correctly, the Merchant will leave themselves wide open to Charge Back or worse blacklisting by the Card Schemes.

The specific technical guidance is more from a security perspective and is designed to reduce the risk of fraud, and is consistently implemented by all the Merchant account providers when a merchant wants to be able to offer recurring payment facilities.

As I said we have had a number of Merchants asking recently about automating these processes, (by interfacing with the payment gateway management tool(s) ?) hence my interest in this thread.

Rgds

Mark

 

[antropy]

I see yes, does your gateway allow this kind of integration?

 

[LMDServicesUK]

Hi Paul

We do provide a set of tools and guidance to enable integration, but my understanding is that it would have to be developed on a per shopping cart basis.

If you like please PM me and I will provide you a link to our resource centre if you are interested ?

Rgds

Mark

 

[maxh]

I'm just setting up this advice-site for merchant accounts http://best-merchant-accounts.co.uk/

It's a bit rough right now, but will be improving presently. Should add some more guides soon.

Might be helpful to you.

BIG P.S. The advice is impartial, I have no great love or affiliation with any MA provider.

 

[LMDServicesUK]

Hi Max

Great news,

I presume you have some background in the industry then ?

Mark