I'm building a website to buy Christmas presents in advance by allowing low income families to pay for them in small payments over a long period of time. So if a father wants to buy a big present for Jimmy (like an Xbox360), they would pay 40 weekly payments and it arrives the week before christmas. My question is I need to do this in a subscription model, and each weekly payment would be pretty small like $5 to $8 (but would increase as the date gets closer to Christmas)... What's the best online authorization service to use (i.e. authorize.net or paypal) for small reoccuring weekly payments? I know the smaller the payment on the credit card, the more these authorization services charge...please help! Thanks in advanced
Depending on your location, a merchant account with an electronic payment gateway (LinkPoint, Authorizenet.com, Verisign's Payflow) might be a bit easier in the long run. Authorizenet.com will charge you about $25.00 a month to use their recurring billing module and then you still have to sign in and make the transaction recurring. With the LinkPoint free recurring billing module, you can use the APi to start the recurring billing. I would recommend trying to get the transaction fee down to maybe $.20 and using the LinkPoint gateway's recurring billing module, you won't have to pay AVS on any recurring transactions.
you will definately need to seek advice from any merchant processor in question. i know for a fact you cannot bill via paypal for goods not sent within 30 days. other processors will refuse to be open to liability for such a long period (40 weeks).