The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: Petruchio on October 01, 2012, 07:26:13 PM
-
Hey all! Now, on my road to ERE, along with copious amounts of Mustachianism, I am now seeking to open up multiple revenue streams! As a young man, this is very exciting for me. However, while my youth and vigor are surely assets in my quest, I do lack experience in otherwise very basic operations.
Without going into details, I am writing out the business plan for a subscription based business. A person signs up and receives my product/service, while I receive X number of dollars each month. However, I am not sure how to handle the subscriptions part quite yet.
I am wondering if anyone cares to explain how to handle Visa/Mastercard/Discover Card transactions, or if there are any other models that a subscription based business may use.
-
Is your product a digital subscription or a physical subscription (i.e. paper magazine)?
If it's a digital subscription, there are quite a few ways to handle what you want. Going with Wordpress as a platform for your website, there are 3 or 4 main membership plugins that take care of the e-commerce aspect of it.
Edit: I know you may not want to share many particulars about your business plan, but more specifics about your deliverables and platform are necessary.
-
The simple answer is to check out http://member.ly/ or a competitor. Also, http://spreedly.com, http://recurly.com, http://chargify.com do subscription billing, but usually integrated into a web app of some kind.
Not sure what it is about 'ly,' but Member.ly is the most geared to subscription services, especially non-online ones.
Other things you will need:
- a payment gateway. This is the online access to a merchant account.
- a merchant account. This is the bank account that is actually tied to the whole credit card story.
Paypal is a great place to start. I really don't like the company, but pragmatically speaking they're the best option, both in terms of function and fees. They provide both the gateway and the merchant account. You'd probably pay $30/month for the privileges.
That said, Memberly doesn't have details posted, so they might do it differently.
Hope this helps.