Regular paper / e-mail invoices and more
Hi,
We are an established Swedish company with a fair amount of recurrently billed subscribing users. We are currently evaluating different recurring billing solutions and would much appreciate to have the following questions answered by someone at CheddarGetter:
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We are located in Sweden and must be able to charge customers in the currency Swedish krona. What are the payment gateway / merchant account options available for us then? We do not yet have a merchant account.
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If the embedded gateway solution fits our "Swedish" needs, do I understand correctly that the $0.20 (Blowing up account) per transaction is the only "per transaction" fee except what the merchant account supplier might charge?
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We need to provide regular invoice (paper and e-mail) as a payment options so subscribing customers. This is a must-have feature for the recurring billing solutions to us. Could we in some way use the recurrent billing engine for this to avoid having to separately manage these customer accounts? For this to work we would accept some development efforts on our side using the API to extract the billing information for each period and send them to customers and follow up on payment and so on and possibly notify CheddarGettar that a payment is completed. What we need is for CheddarGettar to manage the customer data, the subscriptions, the upgrade/downgrade logic and all that good stuff. CheddarGettar would still be our one and only "billing view" customer database.
/Martin Söderström, developer
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1 Posted by adam on 15 Dec, 2011 03:53 PM
Hi Martin,
I'm sorry but we do not offer any sort of "offline" payment methods at this time. It is in our development plans, but we likely won't get to that until later next year.
We could accomodate your first two requirements if you decided to create your own separate offline method.
Thanks,
Adam
adam closed this discussion on 15 Dec, 2011 03:53 PM.
martin re-opened this discussion on 15 Dec, 2011 04:36 PM
2 Posted by martin on 15 Dec, 2011 04:36 PM
Adam,
Thanks for responding. Ok, no offline payment method right now then. Too bad since keeping two systems for the recurring billing sounds like a nightmare.
I'm thinking that there is of course the really dirty way to achieve our goal of having CheddarGetter as our master billing engine which would be to assign our own credit card to customer accounts that need paper invoices and have your billing engine do its work as usual, just to have our own software collect the payed invoices from CheddarGetter to perform the offline billing with these as blueprints. This way all the CheddarGetter goodies like subscription management, upgrade/downgrade and so on would be handled in a central place as we want it. One drawback would be that we would collect money from our customers later than what is optimal, but that might be OK. And of course there is the drawback of the transaction costs.
So two more questions if I may:
What do you think of the idea, would it work or is it just weird? With your knowledge of the internals of CheddarGetter, can you think a better dirty way of using the system to achieve our goals. If we could have this solved, even with a dirty solution, CheddarGetter could be our billing engine of choice since it meets most of our other needs.
/Martin
3 Posted by adam on 04 Jan, 2012 03:23 PM
Martin,
Sorry this slipped through the cracks at the end of the year.
In answer to your questions:
Instead, your best option would be to add a credit for those customers that pay you "offline". You can do this through the admin on each individual customer page, or programmatically through the API.
Best,
Adam
4 Posted by martin on 04 Jan, 2012 03:31 PM
Adam,
Thanks for responding. We'll have a look at this idea and evaluate it.
/Martin
5 Posted by Ramón Amat on 23 Jan, 2012 09:06 PM
Hi,
I was looking for a subscriber and subscription management software and got stuck with CG. Printing paper bills is very common here in switzerland. Therefore, this is a must requirement for a billing system here in switzerland. Therefore I was following this discussion and wondering, why on earth I should follow this advise
Posted by adam on January 04, 2012 @ 04:23 ?
you mean a credit card? or a credit? Of course I would be interested in knowing, how you progress with CG "martin" for paper billing.
Regards Ramon
6 Posted by martin on 24 Jan, 2012 10:02 AM
Ramon,
In our case, we have still not decided what solution fits best. Hosted services like CheddarGetter or Chargify are still under consideration, but we are also evaluating the open source billing platform JBilling that might be of interest to you if you have Java skills available and are focusing more on the subscriber and subscription management features than online payment processing.
Regards,
/Martin
7 Posted by Ramon Amat on 26 Jan, 2012 07:51 AM
Hi Martin,
Your proposal sounds interesting. In fact, I am focused on subscriber and subscription management and paper billing. Online billing ist today for me a nice to have. I will have a try to Jbilling. Keep me informed, what is your outcome.
Kind Regars
Ramon
8 Posted by martin on 26 Jan, 2012 08:16 AM
Ramon,
If you feel like it, drop me an email at martin at mjukkultur.se and we can keep in touch on this subject.
Regards,
-Martin
Dean closed this discussion on 18 Jan, 2013 04:33 PM.