Online Payment Processing with Salesforce.com

When a purchase or donation is made online, a form is used to collect the needed data and send it through a payment gateway to a payment processor, which then sends it to your bank account. If you want some or all of that data to also go directly into your CRM/database, you will need a method of integrating the online payment capture into that system. Once that is done, a single user submission of payment information will both send the funds to your payment gateway/processor (Authorize.net, PayPal, etc.) and to your CRM/database, creating new records as needed.

There are numerous options for online payment apps that can perform the above. RogueIT’s Chargent and Linvio’s PaymentConnect are the only ones that are native salesforce.com apps, meaning they are built on the force.com platform and therefore offer seamless integration. Other contenders are: Kugamon, which is actually PaymentConnect with additional modules built on top to create an advanced order management solution; Zuora, a hybrid of native SF and their own SaaS service (with per transaction fees); and in a manner Pervasive, which seeks to integrate payment data so that it can move from PayPal to salesforce.com, but which unfortunately can't handle some standard functionality needed in such an integration such as refunds or recurring payments. This article focuses on the two native solutions, Chargent and PaymentConnect.

Both of these apps are highly regarded and reliably effective at fulfilling their tasks. If you want the company making the app to do all the work for you, take a closer look at PaymentConnect. For under $1200$1400 they will set up the web forms and the connections to both salesforce.com and your chosen payment gateway/processor. After that you will pay monthly fees for use of both the app and the form. Monthly fees are discounted for non-profits.

If you want to process credit card payments manually, not online, the fees for Chargent are equivalent to PaymentConnect for businesses and donated (free) for non-profits. However, if you decide to go with online payments on Chargent, you will have to pay for their "Platform Edition," which sports a somewhat higher price tag and is not free for non-profits, but is discounted 50% for them.

Note that in general I am not giving exact prices in this article, as prices are subject to change and different rates apply to businesses and non-profits. As an example however, when I last checked for a non-profit the Chargent rate for online payment integration was $75 monthly (50% NPO discount) while the PaymentConnect fee was the monthly equivalent of $50 $87 (paid annually) if you make your own web form, or $80 $120 monthly equivalent if you also want them to create your webform for you.

For online payment processing with Chargent, businesses will need to create their own web form (Visualforce page connected to Sites). Development costs can be anywhere between $1,000-10,000, depending on what your apex developer charges and how customized you want the look and functionality of your form to be. In general, instead of building customizations themselves, Rogue IT chooses to partner with established consulting and integration companies who offer a broader set of skills than just payment integration, including the online payment integration within broader projects. Non-profits can use the free Donate Now! widget from Mansa Systems, which takes just a few hours to install for someone familiar with how Visualforce and Sites communicate with each other and the force.com platform in general. For both businesses and non-profits, since you are setting up both the app and the form in-house, or with a consultant you hire, there is no $1400 set up fee paid to Rogue IT.

So essentially, when it comes to online payment receipt, with PaymentConnect you pay up front for Linvio (the app's maker) to do the set up for you, then pay a slightly lower monthly fee [based on whether] you make your own web form. With Chargent you do more to set it up yourself, but pay no set up fee, then face slightly higher $75 monthly charges relative to using PaymentConnect with a web form you created yourself.

Both are great apps, so I won't try to compare them at that level. With either you will be happy with the product you receive. And though the free non-profit version of Chargent for manual payment processing within salesforce.com does not come with support, once you move to the paid online payment processing version their product is supported, just like PaymentConnect.

Edit Note: This article was edited in June 2011 to reflect a price increase by Linvio. The current Linvio non-profit set up fee is $1,320, plus $1,050 in annual recurring license fees for the base PaymentConnect product and $400 yearly for the Mini-Store add-on (Donation Landing Page).