What's the best online payment processing solution?

[jmpeters]

I'm looking for an online credit card payment processing solution that can handle recurring monthly payments. I'm open to linking off of my site to a hosted provider, so long as I can sufficiently customize the look-and-feel. I'm also open to a lower-level code-it-yourself type of solution. Of course I don't want to spend too much time on this, and I want it to be cheap. :) Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences.

[epi0Bauqu]

See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5303

[jmpeters]

Great info, thanks.

Paysimple looks pretty good: http://www.paysimple.com/competitors.html . Anyone have any first-hand experience with it?

[epi0Bauqu]

As I noted in one of those links, I've had success with Cybersource in the past. Their small business division is pretty competitive. For recurring payments, I just stored the cards encrypted and re-billed when necessary. It really wasn't too difficult or time consuming.

[augustus]

i have some experience with this.

i researched a lot of payment gateways such as authorize.net but decided against it because they have a lot of fixed costs which you can only recuperate with high volume.

Also online processors have a lot of procedures, credit checks etc. which is a lot of pain.

I went with paypal but had a lot of trouble with theiragent when dealing with fraud.

I would probably try amazon if I was doing it today.

Once you have an established volume you can switch to a dedicated service like authorize.net. Until then it is better to pay per transaction.

Regards.

-Augustus

[ivankirigin]

People seem to like PayPal, and are used to the checkout process. I'd also like to hear about how customizable it is, as I'll be working on it in a few weeks.

[zviband]

amazon's new flexible payments system

[rrival]

Fwiw, FPS, while progressive in comparison to PayPal in that its % cut increases as Amazon's costs do, is, unfortunately, limited to US customers at the moment.

[iamyoohoo]

I've used authorize.net in the past. They were recently acquired by cybersource.