Hey...my name is Ed and I'm the founder of Aria Systems (www.ariasystems.com) which we started based on my experience building a very large subscription based service (2.5 Million users). I'd encourage you to think about a few things when creating a subscription based service:
1. Think beyond taking people's money. Consider all of the use cases (credits, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, partner commissions, activation etc.). This way you can create a great customer experience, reduce cost of acquisition and maybe more importantly reduce the cost of owning a customer.
2. caveat emptor with payment processors and payment methods. Make sure you understand things like processor fees, reserves, chargeback fees, chargeback disputes and window for chargebacks. Also, please please please treat processors and payment methods separately...almost like different layers in your application. The timing of fund settlement is critical...it may be worth it to pay a little extra in fees for faster cash.
3. Scale. Volume and velocity of transactions. Some pay methods and merchant account providers only offer a best effort service. Think deeply about your projections, response times of each step in the process vs. your needs. Ask for latency SLA's if you think you'll spike volume at launch or PR etc.
4. Security. Think about security from a process perspective and don't rely solely on your processor's PCI compliance. Compliance needs to be END TO END!
1. Think beyond taking people's money. Consider all of the use cases (credits, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, partner commissions, activation etc.). This way you can create a great customer experience, reduce cost of acquisition and maybe more importantly reduce the cost of owning a customer.
2. caveat emptor with payment processors and payment methods. Make sure you understand things like processor fees, reserves, chargeback fees, chargeback disputes and window for chargebacks. Also, please please please treat processors and payment methods separately...almost like different layers in your application. The timing of fund settlement is critical...it may be worth it to pay a little extra in fees for faster cash.
3. Scale. Volume and velocity of transactions. Some pay methods and merchant account providers only offer a best effort service. Think deeply about your projections, response times of each step in the process vs. your needs. Ask for latency SLA's if you think you'll spike volume at launch or PR etc.
4. Security. Think about security from a process perspective and don't rely solely on your processor's PCI compliance. Compliance needs to be END TO END!
I hope this was helpful.