One of the most important parts of Spreedly is how your customers interact with it when they buy a subscription from your site. Up until now, that interaction came in one flavor, we’ll call it vanilla:

While we’ve done a lot to make the payment pages neutral and keep the process simple, various businesses we’ve talked to have wanted more control. I mean, vanilla is great, but sometimes you just want chocolate, right? Well, we’ve heard those requests, and today I have the privilege of announcing that the recently launched Payments API allows Spreedly-powered sites to completely control their subscriber’s payment experience if they so choose.

How it Works

The new API allows you to create a flow like this:

As you can see, when using the Payments API your customers will stay on your site, and all communication with Spreedly will happen via API calls. Spreedly of course still takes care of all the details of subscription management including building an invoice for you to display, pro-rating customers, etc., but now you can own the display of all the info and create a completely custom experience. Read all about how it works over at the Integration Reference.

Caveats

There are a few important things to be aware of if you’re thinking of using the Payments API.

• It is significantly more work to implement against, simply because you have to build out all the views and deal with a new set of API calls. For this reason our strong recommendation is that sites start out using the Spreedly-hosted payment flow, and only switch to the Payments API once they’re driving traffic and it makes sense to spend the time on it.
• On a related note, using the Payments API means that your site will touch credit card data. This means that you will need an SSL certificate and will have to pay close attention to security to make sure customer’s payment information is protected. Thankfully Spreedly still takes care of long-term storage of payment information, so you only have to make sure the details stay safe until they’re handed off to Spreedly.
• While Spreedly’s support for PayPal Express is already limited (no support for auto-recurring subscriptions), the Payments API goes even further and provides no support at all for PayPal Express (yet).

Of course, these are all trade-offs – if you’re undaunted, go for it! We’re not trying to scare you, just let you know what you’re getting into.

Feedback

As always, we’re really keen to hear what you think of the new API – don’t hesitate to drop us an email at support@spreedly.com or get in touch via Get Satisfaction.