Rails Payment Gateway Solutions

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi All,

I'm in the process of once again researching Rails payment gateways for a couple of my production sites. I wanted to gather opinions and thoughts on what you all are using, and why you may or may not like it.

My current payment gateway includes Paypal and Zong.

Zong is a mobile credits system where you can pay by phone, but it still has its own issues, namely how much providers will allow a phone to be charged in the U.S. Once you go above a certain price range, they automatically request credit card payments instead and future purchases, regardless of price range, are processed via the credit card. I don't particularly like this feature, or how they implement an iframe solution for their payment processing system. I have created a full system for Rails for use with this payment provider, but I haven't released the code yet.

Paypal seems to be pretty consistent. However, I have run into some issues where they have processed a virtual subscription and then within 5 minutes voided the sale without sending notification via IPN. The explanation they provide is that the person paid from an IP address that was in a location that may have appeared suspect. Usually, following up with the customer directly, I find that they did attempt payment and that Paypal's security dropped the ball so to speak on the entire process. Luckily, I find less than 2 to 3% of all virtual sales to encounter this security block.

The greatest issue I've encountered with both is the ability to process payments from a mobile phone without creating a custom app. I use jQuery Mobile with Rails 3 and wrap my site around a mobile browser for phone users. I have not found a way for either Zong or Paypal to correctly zoom the logins based off a mobile aspect. Paypal has their own mobile app. Zong has neither. This leaves me without a mobile based payment process system.

What I would like to accomplish is this:

HTML and MOBILE payment processing (must have) Credit Card processing (must have) * Pay by Phone (verizon/AT&T) (optional)

Please provide any feedback.

Thank you.

2

It looks like Paypal has created a few more solutions which I'm now looking into. One of the problems I have is I don't want to use SSL on my site and process payments on my site. This left me using Paypal Standard. In order to use Pro you need to use SSL. It looks like they've established an API / PCI compliant version of their services called "Paypal Advanced". This uses an iFrame on your website but I'm looking into whether or not they have mobile browsing interaction enabled into this service as well.

It does appear they do have mobile browsing interaction services on their site now, but which solution it is used with is unknown at this time. I have a call into them and will report back any research I find out.

If anyone has used Paypal's advanced solution and integrated with Rails, I'll be interested to see your experience.

Thanks.

3

I haven't used either, but I've heard bad things about Paypal and great things about Stripe (both from a customer service and easy of use perspective; they have a PCI compliant interface)

4

Greg Akins wrote in post #1055148:

5

Does anyone have any feedback on Stripe? Thanks for raising this, very useful.

6

Okay, I can now provide feedback on Stripe.

First, there is an easy to follow Railscasts tutorial by Ryan Bates which covers how to implement Stripe. However, this tutorial is meant for recurring based subscriptions and does not cover regular charge objects (single payments). So, you have to review the API at stripe.com to understand how to do things.

The main points that I can cover are that you have three types of transaction objects that you will work with when using Stripe. These are:

Token Object (credit card) Customer Object (your customer) Charge Object (can use the token or the customer)

If you are doing recurring subscriptions you are working with tokens, customers, and plans.

If you are doing single charges you work with tokens and charges.

The entire setup is pretty easy to follow and I was able to get it incorporated into my site for both html and mobile views (jQuery Mobile) in under 2 days.

The Good:

Stripe.com handles the SSL encryption for sales and is PCI Service Provider Level 1, which means they have the most stringent level of certification available.

They also allow you to use PGP for site to site encryption if you want to go that far in your communications from end to end.

The Bad:

Even though you aren't handling the cards themselves they appear to be adamant about requiring to have SSL on your site. This is a hefty fee for some and bothers me because I don't want to handle SSL or keep credit card information on my site at all. I do not believe if they enforce you to have SSL or if they strongly just recommend it. I would think that you could still use a non-SSL site and communicate with PGP for security. I've emailed them and am waiting for more information.

They also have a $15 dollar service fee for chargebacks. This means if you sell a virtual good on your site for say $.99 cents and a customer disputes this, regardless of whether or not you win the dispute, you pay $15 dollars. If you have 1,000 charges of $.99 cents and 20% of the customers dispute the transaction this means you have earned roughly $800 dollars and spent $3000 dollars.

I do not like this type of fee as paypal does not have a $15 dollar charge back fee. I suppose you can get around this by having a strong refund policy because refunds are free from Stripe's point of view. They also have a nice control panel that you can handle the refunds if you want to do this manually.

I hope some of this information helps.

7

So I researched PayPal in comparison to Stripe and came up with the following:

Stripe:

Charges 2.9% + $0.30 cents per transaction with a $15.00 charge back fee if a customer disputes the charge. They have no monthly fee.

Can be wrapped into jQuery Mobile and used on mobile phones.

Requires SSL even though you don't process the card payments on site.

Supports Credit Card Payments only

Only US based and does not support International

PayPal: Standard

Charges 2.9% + $0.30 cents per transaction with no chargeback fees. They also have no monthly fee for the standard package. They also have a reduction in costs based on the dollar amount:

$3,000 - $10,000 : 2.5% + $0.30 cents $10,000+ : 2.2% + $0.30 cents

They now have a new mobile view wrapper so that you can now use their services on mobile phones without applications.

Does not require SSL.

Supports Credit Card Payments and Bank Transfers through PayPal

US and International

PayPal: Advanced

Exactly the same as Standard except they also charge a $5 dollar monthly fee and you use an iFrame to make the payments feel native to your application.