Braintree, a Paypal service and subsidiary, is a billing platform which stores credit card data directly from the merchant’s systems on secure servers, and it allows for cards to be recharged or refunded . Braintree also supports international payments. Pricing is 2.9% plus a 30c transaction fee.
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Recharge
Score 5.0 out of 10
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ReCharge, the eponymous subscription management software solution from ReCharge Payments headquartered in Santa Monica, is said by the vendor to have helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription business. Be it a curated monthly box, recurring necessities or access to exclusive perks, they state ReCharge drives billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers.
Braintree is a good payment processor if you are looking to accept multiple payment methods across multiple geographies and localizations. It is also a good place to keep a single source of truth for customer payments and keeping payment methods on file. If you are only in one geography or would be fine with accepting only a single payment type, Braintree is not a good choice.
Recharge's entry level subscription plans are cheap, allowing small brands to spin up a subscription program and get started. But at scale, Recharge gets expensive compared to much of the competition and runs into many limitations around subscription acquisition, management, and retention. We run into regular bugs and issues that are time consuming to fix. In my opinion, much of Recharge's functionality updates are adding on new features that they charge you for even though much of the subscription related functionality is clunky, sluggish, and doesn't perform incredibly well.
Not all companies support the use of Braintree. I wish there was more back-end support on some of the sites we wanted to use. This is more about the sites we want to use and less about Braintree, but it's worth mentioning.
As a product, functionality has been fine for us. In our experience, some issues during On Boarding but because we had a dedicated Account Manager assigned to us, these issues were dealt with. Now we are a customer, it feels like they have stopped caring about us or aren't interested in working with us to resolve any issues we have.
In my experience, Recharge is very slow loading, both for our customer facing dashboards and our internal dashboards. We regularly deal with customer complaints, having difficulty using their subscription management dashboard. Working in the Recharge admin dashboard is also slow and clunky. It can be a little bit of a battle to get stuff done and it's not uncommon for analytics dashboards to simply fail to load. All in all, working with Recharge is not an enjoyable experience for me.
Their support is a joke. There's nothing "supportive" about them. Every time I call in with an issue no one has an answer or even a recommendation. I am put on hold and no one ever comes back. It's time to find another processor.
In my experience, Recharge support is... quite poor. They are slow to respond and unhelpful. Even at a different brand I worked at with an Enterprise contract and guaranteed few hour response times, they would regularly take one to three days to get back to me, which is quite a bit longer than the Enterprise support response times. I've had to get into arguments with them multiple times about bugs before they would admit them to be bugs and fix them and their go to support is to usually blame Shopify. There was one time I accidentally sent an email to a different vendor asking about Recharge support, and the other vendor provided a more helpful response than Recharge support.
Paypal's Business plan has a monthly charge in addition to the per transaction charges if you'd like to use recurring billing. Braintree gives you recurring billing options without the monthly charge and automatically sends a transaction receipt to the client each month. Once it is set up it is completely hands off which saves a lot of time.
Bank of America merchant products. They charge extra for setups that include manually entered credit cards. They also have high start up costs that would take a while to pay for themselves due since we don't process enough transactions to make it worthwhile.
We actually surveyed over a dozen potential Shopify subscription apps before we finally decided to settle on Recharge. Recharge is definitely not the cheapest, but they also weren't the most expensive, either. For the all of the features and technology they offer versus what they are charging, we found it to be extremely fair (and now well worth the price).
The competitive rates we are receiving with Braintree through their program for BigCommerce enterprise customers have saved us quite a bit in sales costs.
Braintree's fraud detection is likely set to very high as when we switched to Braintree we only received 1 fraudulent transaction in 2 years which is a huge relief.
Prompt disbursements have granted us faster ROI than other payment processors.
