We sometimes are asked why we only take PayPal for subscriptions to ReservationKey. The primary reason is because it is easy for us and is generally easy for our users. For us, we are able to keep our costs low by not having to spend any additional resources handling billing. With PayPal subscriptions, all of our payments are completely automated, whether our users pay by the month or by the year. Although we do pay PayPal 2.5% plus 30 cents per transaction, we feel this is a reasonable expense considering how big of time savings we have with PayPal subscriptions. If we didn’t automate our subscription process, we would have to track when payments are owed, send reminders to people whose accounts are not current, all of which would take resources away from doing what we love to do, which is continuing to develop a better and better product.
For our users, paying with PayPal is generally very easy. The initial set up of the subscription is quick, as users are redirected to PayPal to set up the subscription. There they can sign in to PayPal to create the initial subscription, or if they don’t yet have a PayPal account, they can easily set one up, and fund the new account with a credit card. Once the initial subscription is created, our users never have to worry about remembering to make their payment since payments happen automatically once a month (or year, depending on subscription type). And users can cancel their subscription at any time by logging into their PayPal account.
The only slight issue we have run into is when user’s credit cards used as their PayPal funding source expire and their payment does not go through automatically. A few months ago we instituted a 15 day grace period in which users can update their credit card details in PayPal. As long as the funding source in PayPal is updated within this 15 day period there will be no interruption in ReservationKey service. Our users receive a warning that their payment did not go through, when this happens, when they log into ReservationKey.
Updating an existing credit card in PayPal is easy. Simply log into PayPal at www.paypal.com.
Then, on the top navigation bar, select Profile, Update Card.
On the next screen, click Edit.
Then, scroll down and update the expiration date and click Save.
This is all there is to it.