payment, billingI am starting a new project that will provide general support services to entrepreneurs.
The service will be provide on an ad-hoc basis. For example we may have requests from a customer several times in the space of a couple of weeks but then we may not hear from them for a couple of months.
I want to charge the customer per support request, but for convenience of the customer, I want the ability to store the customers card details so that they do not have to keep giving us their details.
So far I have phoned PayPal (I already use PayPal for card processing) & Zoho asking for a solution but to no avail.
With thanks to anyone with any suggestions.
Storing people’s credit card numbers is a huge risk. If you don’t have a PCI grade secure enclave to store the information in and you ever lose it to compromise you’re in serious jeopardy. I would do one of two things. Pick a better partner that offers that service for you (probably white label). Depending on what your technology stack is you can select the best partner best on that.
Another alternative would be to sell credits. Think of them like facebook credits. The entrepreneurs can purchase bundles of credits from you and they only have to restock periodically.
Another alternative would be monthly billing. You might not be at a point in your business where you can afford to extend people credit, but if you are, that adds a lot of credibility to your business from a customer point of view.
Don’t store credit card data. The risk in doing so is big, and you’re not allowed to store some pieces of information (the security code at the back of the card.)
| Charge in advance instead. Depending on what you type of client you have, also consider being a tiny bit lenient when it comes to enforcing things with repeat clients: “All right! So we’re all good now. Btw, I can see your pre-paid support balance is [all used up | running very low], so please take a time to refill it at your convenience.” or “OK let’s get this done. Btw, I see your pre-paid support balance is nearly-used up, so you might need to refill it after we’re done – at your convenience.” |
Clients don’t mind getting prompted to pay when you just saved the day. They’ll happily pull out their credit card when you do. (They do mind, however, being told to pay up or else, as they feel they’re getting gouged when you approach them so, and that is why I’m suggesting to be a tiny bit lenient – just enough to make the pill easier to swallow, by putting delivering results before worrying about upfront payments when the balance is running low.)
You should integrate into a billing platform and use their API.
There is a lot of coding involved in billing and you don’t want to do this yourself.
For example, FreshBooks handles:
And a heck of a lot more! So, yeah, programming with their API will definitely take time but it’s worth it!
Here are the top choices for billing platforms. Not sure if all store credit card info:
For my last business, I integrated into FreshBooks and it was great. This can take a long time depending on how your product works. But it’s worth it.
What you are looking for is a provider with the ability to tokenize or “vault” your card data. They provide you with a token in place of the card data and you store the token.
Later, to run a transaction on the same card, you initiate a transaction and pass in the token instead of a card number.
There are numerous services out there that provide this but are generally fairly expensive.
A couple that come to mind:
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.