A payment gateway is essentially a digital version of the point-of-sale systems you see in brick and mortar stores. Just like accepting a credit card transaction in a physical store, a payment gateway accepts a credit card for a transaction that takes place online.
Payment gateways power the eCommerce world, allowing customers to transfer funds to businesses online in seconds. But, when it comes to membership sites, this transfer needs to happen on a recurring basis—ideally, automatically.
If you’re planning to user recurrent payment method to power your membership business, you might be wondering:
- How are recurring payments set up?
- How does Dream Orange communicate with my payment gateway?
- Is there anything I need to do to make sure that payments are processed successfully on a recurring basis?
In this post, we’re going to address all of these questions to help you better understand how recurring payments work with the solutions of Dream Orange.
A Common Misconception About Recurring Payments
You might assume that when a customer signs up for your membership, each subscription payment thereafter would need to be a unique one-time charge.
This would require the website to send a new request for this charge to the payment gateway every time a payment is due. That could be monthly or yearly, for example.
If this were the case, any issue with the platform, or website being used (a website crash, for example) could mean that the payment request is never made—and you don’t get paid.
At Dream Orange solutions with our integrations and Partners, we wanted to avoid this potential problem altogether, so we set up our service a little differently.
How PMPro Communicates with Your Payment Gateway
When a customer signs up for your membership with Dream Orange solutions, the recurring payment setup occurs at the payment gateway level, not within the membership site itself.
Then, the payment gateway sends information about each subscription to your membership site through a webhook or IPN.
The Dream Orange solutions are programmed to “listen” for these messages and take appropriate actions based on the message content.
These actions include:
- Creating a new order
- Charging a recurring payment
- Canceling a user’s membership
To clarify, our solutions only needs to communicate with the payment gateway one time when the subscription is first created. The site does not have to communicate with the payment gateway each time a recurring payment needs to be processed.
This offers multiple benefits:
- It’s more secure, as the plugin does not need to store any sensitive customer data.
- You still get paid if something happens to your membership site. Even a site crash will not affect the payment gateway or your recurring payments schedule.
Plus, when payments are handled entirely at the gateway level, you can make changes to your site, membership plugin, or platform without it affecting your members’ recurring payments.
Payment gateways specialize in processing payments, so why not let them handle things? With Dream Orange solutions, we wanted to keep things simple and make sure that recurring payments do not rely on the membership site itself.
If you want to learn more about how to integrate the recurrent payments to your project send us an email to hello@dreamorange.ca o fill our contact form to send us a message.
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