Was just curious how many of you handle a couple of credit card issues.

1. Do you retain credit card numbers on file, say on a separate billing server, so you can charge customers on a recurring basis and give them access to change their billing info online 24/7? Or, do you just ask the customer to go back and add funds each time their accounts come due to expire with a warning e-mail ahead of time (this would seem tedious if someone were to sign up on a monthly basis)? Guess the meat of this is what is the most effective way to bill customers and protect their credit card information?

2. Does anyone send checks to customers who are due money back, instead of giving them their money back via their original credit card in order to aviod having to pay the hefty chargeback fees? If you do, has this been effective for you?

I know there's probably a million ways to do this...just looking for some helpful words of wisdom from the experts. Thanks in advance!!

1. Do you retain credit card numbers on file, say on a separate billing server, so you can charge customers on a recurring basis and give them access to change their billing info online 24/7? Or, do you just ask the customer to go back and add funds each time their accounts come due to expire with a warning e-mail ahead of time (this would seem tedious if someone were to sign up on a monthly basis)? Guess the meat of this is what is the most effective way to bill customers and protect their credit card information? We do both...

a) Client can choose to use a third party processor (kagi/paypal) to submit their payment via credit card each time a payment is due. In this way, we never see their CC information and the third party does not store it. We send invoices 15 days prior to due date and deactivation notices 5 days after due date therefore leaving it up to them... (this is also true for on and offline check payments). If the account is not paid 10 days after the due date it is then deactivated and we do charge a reactivation fee which helps to avoid "bad habits" in that area...

or

b) Client can choose to have us automatically debit their card each month w/o the need for them to do anything for as long as the card and account are good. In this case we do not store their CC info online for security reasons. If the client info changes they do in fact need to re-fill out a form submitting the new info. I do not see a need for them to view their old CC number in full to update it to a new one... first/last four digits is the farthest I'd go...

Sending invoices/deact notices etc can be extremely tedious if you do not have something automated in place. If it is automated it's not much of a problem at all. We do send invoices to all clients that have an amount due whether we'll be automatically debiting or not..and the invoices note as such.

2. Does anyone send checks to customers who are due money back, instead of giving them their money back via their original credit card in order to aviod having to pay the hefty chargeback fees? If you do, has this been effective for you? Refunds should be delivered in the same form they were received. You may be breaking some serious rules if you do not follow through with this. If client pays with credit card then the refund should go to that same card. If client pays with a check then the refund should be in the form of a check. Be careful doing anything other then this.

Thanks, Deb.

Reason I ask is that I've been looking at various control panels and I'm trying to figure out how I can automate handling customers without too much cost or major investment in time. I 'd like customers to be able to sign up online, generate an account on the server, make it easy for them to get re-billed, and easy to check their account info online. I'm just a one man shop at the moment, so anything I can find to help automate this would be really nice. I looked at PSoft's H-Sphere control panel s/w which has integrated billing...but apparently they maintain the credit card info on file so they can handle recurring billing...this worries me. Though they only show the last 4 of the CC number to the customer when the customer checks their account, the number has to be stored somewhere on the servers posing a potential security risk. I thought about just doing billing by check, but I'm sure customers will get turned off by this given today's "I want it now" train of thought and the ease of finding another provider.

Hmm, I don't have to look after it at all. Try teaming up with a company that can handle recurring billing.

1. Customer fills in order details
2. Customer gets automatically billed each month until they cancel.

As soon as they cancel, I get an email about this from the cc company and I can cancel their hosting account.

That sounds like a definite possibility. I can build the sign up forms, so long as the cc company can handle the information passed to it on a recurring basis. Any recommendations on a cc company to go with? I'm guessing most, if not all, can handle this type of transaction setup.

I'm looking for a set up which handles recurring and so far I'm leaning towards http://www.revecom.com

I know there are quite a few folks use them for hosting and they seem a solid company.