Since Donnerwood is going to be a consumer-facing enterprise, we need to have a billing system. Luckily, one of our employees built the entire billing system used by Listen.com/Rhapsody, so we know how to do it, but we really want to have him do more value-added work since there is no more gain in having your own billing system than there is in building your own ad serving system. Doubleclick and others addressed this issue by creating ad serving & tracking systems, but I have to say that there is a serious lack of similar players in the billing sector.
Billing in the consumer sector is deceptively easy at first. You just want to take credit cards, so you write a simple interface for Cybersource and call it a day. But then the world starts to get more complicated... you want to allow for subscriptions and micropayments, and integrate PayPal, and give refunds, and tie into your customer service system, and offer coupons, and offer alternative currencies, and tie into your financial systems, etc - get the picture? Pretty soon you have a small team working on a system which is crucial for your business, but which has practically identical functionality as 100 other systems.
So not wanting to build it ourselves and not being happy with the open source alternatives, I asked more than 25 comparable companies what they were using - these were all consumer-facing internet firms, with sales from $1M to $50M+. Every single one had built their own system and no one thought it was a competitive advantage! It's simply mind-boggling. We kept searching and finally found a provider to help us - we're still under NDA, so we can't talk about it until launch, but it looks like they will fit the bill, outside of requiring an Oracle database (must work with MySQL in future) and not yet being integrated with Paypal (hopefully coming soon).
Has anyone else found billing systems which work for them? If not, tell your local investor to go start funding some...
UPDATE: our previously secret billing provider is ThinkSubscription - (they acquired another provider called Sandlot) - they have been in the billing business for years and they appear to have the best solution for what we and many other similar services need. We have yet to fully deploy them, but outside of the tweaks I mentioned above, they look like a winner at this point.
At the time of the original post, the PayPal integration was fairly new. THINK has recently added multi-tiered PalPal pricing to the applications. This is ideal for those interested in handling both micropayments and other standard prices through PayPal.
Posted by: Paul Russell | January 30, 2006 at 08:44 AM