Just looking for some recommendations for the simplest way to handle
online credit card purchases with a merchant account. From searching
through some of the previous list messages, it looks like
trustcommerce.com and authorize.net come highly recommended, so I'm
just trying to figure out which one will be the easiest to integrate
with rails.. Cost isn't much of an issue, but time is, so the
faster/easier something is to implement and get working, the better
(I've got a tight deadline).
From what I can tell, trustcommerce has a ruby library
(http://www.trustcommerce.com/tclink.php) to interface with their API,
while authorize.net does not (however, it looks like there are third
party libraries such as ActiveMerchant or Ruby Payment which will
handle the integration).. I'm just wondering if anyone has had any
experience with either of these libraries or the trustcommerce ruby
integration and can recommend one over the other.
Also, does it make it any easier to use a merchant account provided by
the payment processing gateway company, rather than a separate
non-related merchant account provider?
I recently launched a rails app that uses TrustCommerce as the payment
gateway to handle monthly subscription billing. They have a nice
feature called Citadel that handles storing a customer profile and
monthly billing so you don't have to store credit card info in you db.
Being CISP-compliant is not easy
I haven't been a customer for long but am very happy with TC so far.
TC can offer you a merchant account through a partner. We chose to
use BofA. It shouldn't matter if you use a merchant account provided
by the payment processing gateway company or a separate merchant
account provider.
The TC ruby API is very robust in my experience. You can also
integrate using straight HTTPS posts. I wrote a rails plugin to
handle the TC Citadel integration. Check it out if you'd like an
example of using the TC API. The plugin uses the ruby extension if
available, otherwise it falls back and uses HTTPS.
Thanks for the info Zack, right now I'm leaning more towards
Trustcommerce unless anyone else has reasons for why I should check out
authorize.net instead.. Thanks for the link to your plugin, I'll
definitely check it out.
I would say at least check out all of your most appropriate options.
I have used authorize.net for quite sometime, and while I do not know
much (hardly anything at all) about trustcommerce, I have been quite
pleased with authorize.net. Really it all comes down to service, if
they can connect to your preferred payment processor, features, and
fees. My 2 cents.
How easy was it to get everything up and running with authorize.net?
Which plugin did you use, the Payment plugin, or Active Merchant? And
do they take care of storing the credit card info on their servers?
I'm not sure if I'll have a need for this, since I'm not going to be
doing subscriptions.. But even so, if a user buys a product and then
returns to the site, ideally I'd like them to be able to purchase more
items without requiring them to re-renter their credit card number, in
which case I guess it would have to be stored externally.. Thanks,
