Lowered Payment Processing Fees & Strengthened PCI Compliance

Requirement

Enloop, a San Francisco, CA Web-based subscription service that generates investor-ready business plans for startups, was spending too much money on processing fees for its recurring subscription payments. Enloop was using a third-party, off-the-shelf ExpressionEngine module that a different developer previously customized. The owner wanted Intercarve to identify and implement a platform that would save her money on processing fees.

Challenges

  • The system’s external behavior was to remain intact so that customer interaction was not impacted in any way.
  • In a time-sensitive migration, customer credit card data needed to be obtained from Authorize.net, imported and merged with subscription details from a local database, and posted in real-time to the new provider.

Approach

  • After analyzing the fee structures of the most popular payment-processing platforms, Intercarve determined that Stripe offered the ideal balance of annual cost savings and API platform capabilities.
  • Our in-house team then replaced the ExpressionEngine module with a new one that communicated with Stripe instead of Authorize.net.
  • We then wrote and ran an automated migration script that created customers and subscriptions in Stripe that matched those of the old systems, down to the exact second.
  • Finally, we ran regression tests to verify our results and provide ongoing support.

Results

  • Strengthened Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.
  • Significantly improved system logging capability.
  • Reduced processing fees 2% to 6%, depending on the credit card used.