Experience with billing systems
- Braintree (and to some extent, other lesser payment gateways)
- Pros
- You're in complete control of the billing system
- You can do more complex payment setups
- Widely supported for multiple programming languages; ActiveMerchant support
- Some of the best support you'll ever see for e-commerce
- Cons
- You probably have to deal with PCI DSS security compliance
- Potentially a lot of extra work (which may very well still be worth it)
- Google Checkout
- Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30
- Pros
- Very low transaction processing fees
- Fantastic if you're already using Google for advertising
- Google handles a lot of the messy stuff involved in billing, like chargebacks
- There's now support for subscriptions (in beta though)
- Cons
- Google's API is different enough from other systems that you usually have to use a library specifically designed for Checkout (e.g., no ActiveMerchant support)
- Paypal
- Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30
- Pros
- Widely understood API; tons of stuff available for dealing with it
- Essentially supported by everything
- Cons
- Lots of people are very vocal about not wanting to do business through PayPal due to bad experiences
- Neutral
- Tends to be popular with the young adult demographic who don't have credit cards and with eBay users
- Amazon FPS
- Transaction Fee: 2.9% + $0.30, lower for bank accounts and balance transfers
- Pros
- Probably your best bet for micro-transactions
- A good choice for payments for physical goods
- Cons
- I don't know enough about the system to say for sure