It's been 2 years coming - we reached the point where Paypal no longer makes sense as the only way to pay us. So for the last week I have been locked away adding support for monthly or annual payments directly from your credit card... and I'm delighted to report that it went live just last night.
How does it work?
Well you go to your Subscription page within your teamwork installation as normal but then you hit this upgrade button...
...you are then taken to our new Billing portal at billing.teamworkpm.net:
As you can see, we now allow you to enter your credit card details quickly and directly but still provide the Paypal option if you need it. The Billing portal is secured with 128 bit SSL security so you can enter your card details with complete peace of mind. We will debit your credit card every month (or every year) recurring until you cancel your account and you can easily switch between plans at any time.
(ps. I couldn't help myself, I had to add the Killer Monkey into the footer.)
Rolling it out - A Side Note
It was funny, I was there in the office after completing days of testing thinking that I'd love to roll this out to just 1 real customer to ensure that everything went smoothly, when I spotted a new feedback message come in. The message subject was "Unable to pay" and it read "Hi. I was trying to pay online and I don’t want to pay through paypal. Is there another way. Thanks Rick". Music to my ears, I sent Rick a reply...
Hi Rick,
I'm here late in the office finishing our new payment gateway.
How would you like to be the first user to give it a go?
You'll be able to pay us directly.
Waiting to hear back from you.
Peter
From Rick:That would be perfect! Just let me know what I Need to do. Thanks Rick.
I replied:
That's great Rick.
You are our very first non-Paypal customer and this represents the culmination of a weeks work for me.
This is going to be historic.. epic even :p
Just go to the subscription page and you should see a credit card entry page.
I'll be holding my breath here...
Peter,Wow awesome. It worked perfect. I checked my account and it shows as processing. Thank you very much. Anything on that Iphone app. Rick
Lol. Nice getting a response like that. Thanks Rick.
Why ditch Paypal?
Well we didn't ditch it, Paypal has been great for us and we will continue to support it. But many of our loyal customers have told us time and time again that they love Teamwork but hate being forced to pay us with Paypal, as you see above with Rick. For many more, Paypal is simply not an option for their organisation.
The second reason is ease of payment. Paypal adds a layer of complexity that is annoying for our customers and loses us business.
The third reason is entirely selfish... switching away from having Paypal as the default payment method makes financial sense for us. You see, Paypal is great for getting started with an online businesses because there are no set-up costs and it offers instant utility. Comparing Paypal to traditional Credit Card processing gateways, the gateways have a high initial cost and a higher cost per transaction while the number of transactions are low but as this graph (knocked up in seconds) shows, the number of transactions reaches a point when the cost of using Paypal becomes higher that the credit card gateway. We reached that point a long time ago.
A note on Security
Just a quick note on the new recurring credit card processing - for security we don't store your credit card details in our database. Instead we send them to our credit card processing partner and we get just back a code that represents the credit card. This means your credit card details are kept completely secure even though we process your payments every month.
Thanks for reading. Hope you all enjoy the new checkout.
I'm moving on, locking myself up again and concentrating on getting the IPhone app out the door before I hear any more screams about it. :)