Recurring billing (variable amount and frequency)

Question

I can find a good payment solution for my site and recurring payments. I've been looking around but can't find any great way of doing it.

On our site our customers are spending virtual credits. The charge their account with new credits when their credits are out. We want to provide them with an automatic refill functionality but we do not want to deal with all the PCI-DSS problems that comes with it.

Basically I'm looking for the following functionality:

• The payment provider should expose (secure hosted pages) where the customer provides all credit card details.

• My site loads the hosted pages with some customerID (to be able to map tokenID with customerID in the last step).

• When the customer has registered his credit card details the payment provider sends a notification to my site that credit card details has been tokenized with a tokenID for customerID.

• In the future I charge my customer with an API call:

API::charge(currency,amount, tokenID);

Is there any payment providers out there that can do this?

Answer 1

You can't use a normal recurring billing system if the amounts change from cycle to cycle. The best you can do is use a service like Authorize.Net's Customer Information Manager (CIM) to store the credit card and billing information for you and then you create your own scheduling engine that charges against the payment method you have stored for them using CIM. CIM also allows you to make off-cycle payments at any time as well.