Is CC Info Stored in CBsubs for recurring payment?

Hello,

We are looking at CBsubs to manage our clients' access and payment to our SaaS application. We offer our app as a monthly service, cancel anytime. We need to allow our clients to come to our Joomla! site and (1) create an account, (2) sign up for a plan, (3) enter the credit card that they will use for recurring payments, and (4) have CBsubs charge that credit card every month until they cancel or change the card number. We are comparing pros/cons of CBsubs vs Recurly. I think I'd rather use CBsubs and retain more control and not have to dev to Recurly's API.

To help me decide, I have a couple of questions I hope someone can answer.

1. Where is credit card info stored? In CBsubs or at the payment gateway (PayPal, Authorize.Net, etc.)? If CBsubs, how is PCI compliance addressed?
2. Can CBsubs charge a credit card automatically on a MONTHLY basis without manual intervention by us or our clients?

Thanks!

Phil

Hi Phil,

1. Never in CBSubs itself (PCI compliance and credit-card liabilities make that not worth for our customers), always at the gateway, where supported by gateway and by CBSubs.

2. Yes, with Paypal (Auto-recurring payment subscriptions), Authorize.net (AIM+ARB, for Auth.net's AIM it doesn't store but passes the credit-card number so it requires a degree of PCI-DSS compliance for your site), 2Checkout (using their automated rebilling), Ogone (using their Alias Manager), CCBill (using their auto-recurring payments), and maybe a few more gateways too.

Thanks for the info! One more question.

What "drives" the recurring charges? Does CBSubs check the database for accounts that require a credit card charge at a certain time and then call the gateway (paypal) to process the transaction? Or, does CBSubs collect all the recurring payment info during the signup phase and then store it at the gateway for the gateway to process at the proper time? Or something else?

Thanks again!

Ogone: CBSubs is the "timing driver" using just the alias number of the credit-card stored securely at Ogone.

All other payment methods listed above: the "timing driver" is the payment provider, and CBSubs does handle and verify their notifications to update payment status and subscriptions/products purchased.