[H-SASIG] Payment database

[Raymond Smith]

Hi Russell,

On 1 May 2010 23:14, Russell Stuart <russell-humbug at stuart.id.au> wrote:
> Greg and I sat down one night and looked at what be needed for Humbug to
> accept membership payments via they web.  We specifically limited the
> scope of the project to just that.  This is what we came up with:

Seems like an impressive amount of scope remaining :-) It seems
reasonable though. I have a few thoughts/comments.

First, I wonder if it is worth looking again at LA's MemberDB. I know
this has been looked at before and people were none-too-happy with it
-- I got the impression this was mostly because it was hard to
install/configure? It looks like it would do almost everything in
scope except for the Payment Engine integration. That would be a
useful enhancement for the community!

I spent a little while looking for competing open source projects, but
came up empty handed. Probably needs a more clueful searcher. There
are an awful lot of SaaS providers but I imagine that you would be
completely uninterested in paying for such services.

Second, on the Payment Gateway side I would take a look at Google
Checkout, PayMate, and PayPal.  This is going to be a lot easy, I
think, than trying to establish yourselves with an Australian Bank. It
may even be not much dearer when you look into the total costs of
processing credit cards directly.

You might also like to consider NOT supporting credit-cards at all but
supporting EFT with a magic number provided by the membership
registration process. EFT is likely to be cheaper for you than credit
cards and saves the integration nonsense. On the downside, you have
the possibility of people screwing up their payment numbers and you
cannot automate receipting.

Third, on the email alias front it would be nice to continue
supporting multiple aliases per member (as we do now for a few
members). This would also be a convenient way to manager president@,
etc.

Cheers,

Raymond