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Ang
10-16-2003, 11:17 PM
I've looked at the merchantquest.com and rsmarketing.com site and well, I'm still a little confused.

I'm trying to set up a site to which people can come and basically sign up for one of 2 types of subscriptions. The first type of subscription would entail people paying a set fee and having access to the service for 3 months. 2 weeks before the 3 months expired, they would be sent an email to remind them and if they wanted to extend their subscription for 3 more months, they could by paying a fee again. The second type of subscription would involve an initial set up fee and then a monthly fee (automated if the user wanted) until the subscription was cancelled.

I want the customers to be able to submit all of the billing information on my site and from what I've seen paypal does not allow this (plus I've heard horror stories about them freezing accounts). So I've been trying to find out what I would need for this to work - but I still have a lot of questions.

1.) Would I need a shopping cart program since I'm not selling products and don't need to track more than one choice?

2.) Does Miva Merchant process the credit card payments or would I need another service to do that?

3.) Do I need to buy a separate secure server certificate or is that included in the Miva Merchant fees? If it's included, is it a shared certificate?

4.) According to one of the pages I read, I would still need a merchant account configured for Authorize.net payment services. Is there a provider of merchant accounts that futurequest.com (or anyone else reading this) recommends? Also, if I set up a merchant account to be used with online payments, could we also use that same merchant account for credit card payments at our office?

5.) How easy is it to work with Miva merchant as far as interacting with other databases? For instance, based on how much the customer paid, we would need our customer database to keep track how far they are paid up to and send out emails when subscriptions were about to run out.

6.) Is there a demo of Miva Merchant or screen shots of how it works anywhere?

7.) Is there anything else I will need or should be aware of while I'm setting this up?

Rich
10-17-2003, 12:38 AM
1) You don't want a traditional cart because its complexity would just increase your abandon rate. You only need a simple order form type checkout application. Try searching for applications that are specifically designed for membership applications.

2) Miva merchant is only the cart software--you still will need a separate payment service and merchant account.

3) SSL certificates are a part of your hosting services, not any add-on software.

4) You'll need a merchant account and a payment processor. Autorize.net is a payment processor. There are thousands to choose from and many good ones. Try searching the e-commerce section of this forum. There are many, many threads with recommendations.

5) re: Miva--As mentioned previously, this is not the type of "cart" for your business. re: recurring billing. This is a topic that we could spend a whole day discussing. But here's some quick tips:

-- Make sure you select a payment processor that supports recurring billing. Due to association rules, you can no longer store credit card info on your web server.

-- Make sure the merchant account provider you choose supports recurring billing for membership services.

-- There are usuallly special rules and requirements for repeat billing. Be sure to discuss these with your merchant account provider and follow them.

-- Don't attempt to implement a system where you notify customers and let them choose whether to go another month. Just automate this until they cancel. Otherwise you'll have high drop out rates and the process of notifying everyone, folloiwng up, etc. becomes very time consuming and costly.

6) Visit miva.com for demos.

7) Yes, about 10,000 things but you can't learn everything in one posting. :)