[Rails] Re: Rails Payment Gateway Solutions

Okay, I can now provide feedback on Stripe.

First, there is an easy to follow Railscasts tutorial by Ryan Bates
which covers how to implement Stripe. However, this tutorial is meant
for recurring based subscriptions and does not cover regular charge
objects (single payments). So, you have to review the API at stripe.com
to understand how to do things.

The main points that I can cover are that you have three types of
transaction objects that you will work with when using Stripe. These
are:

Token Object (credit card)
Customer Object (your customer)
Charge Object (can use the token or the customer)

If you are doing recurring subscriptions you are working with tokens,
customers, and plans.

If you are doing single charges you work with tokens and charges.

The entire setup is pretty easy to follow and I was able to get it
incorporated into my site for both html and mobile views (jQuery Mobile)
in under 2 days.

The Good:

Stripe.com handles the SSL encryption for sales and is PCI Service
Provider Level 1, which means they have the most stringent level of
certification available.

They also allow you to use PGP for site to site encryption if you want
to go that far in your communications from end to end.

The Bad:

Even though you aren't handling the cards themselves they appear to be
adamant about requiring to have SSL on your site. This is a hefty fee
for some and bothers me because I don't want to handle SSL or keep
credit card information on my site at all. I do not believe if they
enforce you to have SSL or if they strongly just recommend it. I would
think that you could still use a non-SSL site and communicate with PGP
for security. I've emailed them and am waiting for more information.

They also have a $15 dollar service fee for chargebacks. This means if
you sell a virtual good on your site for say $.99 cents and a customer
disputes this, regardless of whether or not you win the dispute, you pay
$15 dollars. If you have 1,000 charges of $.99 cents and 20% of the
customers dispute the transaction this means you have earned roughly
$800 dollars and spent $3000 dollars.

I do not like this type of fee as paypal does not have a $15 dollar
charge back fee. I suppose you can get around this by having a strong
refund policy because refunds are free from Stripe's point of view.
They also have a nice control panel that you can handle the refunds if
you want to do this manually.

I hope some of this information helps.

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.