payment, billingSay, I have a project that users will pay for on recurring basis, or any other way with credit cards.
I don’t need the billing system to be highly flexible or customizable as it’s made just for this project. I suppose I can even have only one bank in the backend to process the payments. Being a programmer I can do some dirty job to connect their system to my project.
I wonder, what’s the shortest path from the payment page to my account? Is it possible that I go to bank, tell them that I want to accept payments online via CC and put the money on my account in this bank and then they provide me with some tools to integrate?
I know I can use Stripe, Braintree or any other of the myriad of billing systems but I am interested in how they work on the side of actual processing of the payments. As these services are attractive to developers because of their simplicity, I wonder what amount of crap and boring stuff they have to deal with?
Can I learn more about it somewhere? Are there special conditions I have to conform to before being able to accept payments besides having a company?
Another big reason for using services like Stripe is to reduce your own risk. When using Stripe, you never actually possess the customer's credit card number and that is a great thing. Possessing credit card numbers online is a HUGE risk, and if someone hacks you and gets a credit card number then you are in big trouble.
If you want to learn more, then you can read up on PCI compliance. It is a lot of work to comply with all credit card regulations, so it is not something most startups want to deal with.
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