Recurring billing with Rails and ActiveMerchant: Best practices, pitfalls, gotchas?

Question

We are prepping for the release of a large web application that has been in development for the past year. We are about to start the process of integrating ActiveMerchant to han

Answer 1

One thing I wanted to add: keep in mind you don't need to use the recurring billing feature that is built into the gateway. In general these systems are legacy and very difficult to deal with, we get spoiled in the rails world.

You get a lot more flexibility just using them for one purpose (to bill a credit card, and perhaps also store credit cards for PCI compliance). Then roll your own recurring billing in your rails app with a cron job, a date field for when they are paid through, and amount each person is paying (in case they used a coupon) etc.

One small example: sometimes people will cancel a monthly subscription in the middle of the month. They want to make sure they don't forget to cancel before the next payment. Most gateway recurring billing that I've seen will instantly terminate the account (or send you a message indicating this). In reality, the user has paid through the end of the month and should be given 2 more weeks of access. You can do this if you have rolled your own recurring billing in rails, but not if you are using the gateway recurring billing. Just a small example.