For anyone out there (especially those of you riding the rails), what payment processing gateway have you/do you use? Would you recommend it to someone else?
I've used many different payment processors both for my own ventures and for my day jobs.
Recommended: Google Payments
Tepid: Paypal, FirePay
Not Recommended: Authorize.NET, TotalTrans, 2Checkout.com
Paypal was the only one I'd done using Rails (the rest with PHP). It was a pain in the ass, but it was also 2005 and Rails was at version 0.13. There is probably a gem or plugin for it now (I implemented it by posting and parsing raw POST requests).
Agreed. Authorize.net is problematic. Not really because of Authorize.net, but because you have to tie it to merchant services--and every one I've used with Authorize.net has been uniformly awful. Everything is targeted to businesses with card reading equipment, rather than online processing--all of the folks at the merchant services companies are baffled by questions about online stuff (and Authorize.net refer you to the merchant services people for a wide array of queries). It's just a poorly matched set of tools.
API support for Authorize.net is excellent, though...that's the only reason I use it. Some weekend I'm going to convert to Google Checkout or something else.
Nothing special. Eventually, it will be a relatively high transaction volume--in the hundreds of thousands of transactions per year, hopefully breaking 1M at some point.
Recommended: Google Payments
Tepid: Paypal, FirePay
Not Recommended: Authorize.NET, TotalTrans, 2Checkout.com
Paypal was the only one I'd done using Rails (the rest with PHP). It was a pain in the ass, but it was also 2005 and Rails was at version 0.13. There is probably a gem or plugin for it now (I implemented it by posting and parsing raw POST requests).