[lug] Letting folks pay from the web.

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:30:43 -0700
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Colorado Moon Festival would like to start letting folks sign up and pay
> via PayPal (or Google Checkout, or ...).
> 
> Have any of you, in BLUG, had experience setting this up?  If so, can you
> offer advice?

PayPal is pretty easy to set up and deal with, for the most part.
There are plenty of PayPal horror stories out there, but we've never
had any problem; indeed, when LWN's credit card processing went down in
flames, PayPal kept us from total collapse.  They have a mildly funky
notification API if you want to totally automate the handling of
payments, but it works.

Credit cards can be harder, but you'll have an easier time getting
money out of people if you accept them.  There's two pieces you need to
set up: the merchant account, and the Internet gateway.  The former can
be hard to get if you're not a corporation in good standing and a bit
of history.  We're using Wells Fargo; they seem expensive but it all
just works, which we value.  On the gateway side I recommend
TrustCommerce; their interface software is open source and they have
bindings for just about any language you can think of.  TrustCommerce
makes it so we don't ever have to store credit card numbers on the LWN
server, even for monthly billing; that has resulted in a lot of
additional restful sleep for me over the years.

jon