What do you use to handle payments?

Lately I have been reading a couple of horror stories about Paypal and I was wondering if anyone out there that accepts subscription type payments uses a different payment processor or maybe a 3rd party that goes through Paypal. Again, I have never had a problem with Paypal and with a million customers I don't know if the horror stories I read are anomalies or not, but then again I don't usually do a lot of transactions monthly.

I've read a lot of horror stories too, but I still use PayPal.

After reading how PayPal money can just "disappear," I immediately cash out (deposit the balance in my bank account). Money I get paid through PayPal is in the account less than 12 hours usually, giving PayPal less time to freeze my money if a conflict were to ever come up against me.

PayPal is by far the most convenient payment processor I've used and their fees are rather modest.

The type of advice I would give depends on what type of transactions are being placed (what are being purchased)? And are the concerns about PayPal security (funds disappearing) or problems with transactions? Different processors have their pluses/minuses.

I use PayPal and I have a merchant account. Even though I can process almost anything through my merchant account a significant number of people prefer to use PayPal because their payment information is kept safe. I do the same thing myself when making purchases. There have been many times I skipped purchasing something because they did not accept PayPal (especially for one time purchases) and I didn't trust the processor they picked (because I know their history). I simply did not want to give the processor my credit card information. PayPal has called me to verify that I made a purchase (like my bank). I feel better that they have a close eye on my account.

If you decide to add more payment options, from my experience, keep PayPal as an option. However, depending on what you want to do, you might not ever encounter a problem. The more one-on-one relationship you have with the person making the purchase the less likely there will be a dispute (if that is the concern).

I am talking about monthly transactions, subscriptions, that would be recurring. I would hope over time there would be a large number of them, but the amount would be small, less than $50 I would imagine. I wonder if there is a way to inform paypal ahead of time of the changes that could be occurring to the account to avoid any freezing.

I know you can handle subscriptions with Amazon Payment Services, as long as you have the time to build your end of the application.

I've had subscription payments for years. PayPal has a toll-free number. You can call them and discuss the expected changes to your account and they'll advise you on the best way to go about doing whatever it is you want to do. They'll make a notation to the account. When I have an expected change I always call. Never had a problem.

Cool, I might have to give them a call then.

I use PayPal and Authorize.net

I use PayPal for several businesses. It's got the benefit of not needing a merchant account through a bank, and a great deal more fraud protection than you get through most any other payment service. I've never had the sort of horror story experience I see people talking about through dozens of accounts over the past 10 years or so... but I believe they happen. PayPal is a pain in the ass to manage with a lot of transactions. Their APIs aren't bad, but their own website is pretty terrible. Even so, it is the cheapest, and fastest solution to start taking payments online.

Authorize.net is pretty good as well. You expose yourself to a lot more risk here as far as fraud, chargebacks, and the like. Money will not disappear from your account if something goes awry (account with your bank, not authorize.net) but the bank may flat out close your account if you have too high a rate of chargebacks.

There is no one winning solution. For a small business, go with paypal, and keep on top of any disputes, know their terms and make sure your customer knows your terms. As you grow add different processors. Big sites have 4 or 5 typically, both to give the customers options as well as fallback in case one of them has a problem.

It looks like I will be sticking with Paypal and hopefully things go smoothly. I won't be pushing a 1,000 transactions a month or anything, at least not yet, so I don't see it being a big problem.

The last post is more than a month ago so I'm not sure how useful this is now but... I'm working on a project that requires a payment platform and ended up choosing a combination of aMember and PayPal to handle transactions and subscriptions.

How is it working out for you?

Well, the project is slated to launch on Feb. 28th so I have no real data, but my tests have been running pretty smoothly. It has allowed a very fluid integration between site and payment gateway, and also allows my users to easily modify their purchase/subscription.

Take a look at WooThemes or Templatic for examples of how they've integrated their payment gateway.