Choosing a payment method

[Stoyicker]

Hi,

I'm a just-graduated software engineer. Me and my team are about to face the development of a new software system. The goal is the automatization of the process to book courts in a sports club. The design we've thought of consists in:

• A server to handle the bookings.
• An Android application to perform bookings from smartphones and tablets. It could be extended to iOS, BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone, but I think that's not really important right now. These applications would communicate through sockets with the server using RSA encryption.
• An embedded application working on a touchscreen in the club to allow users without modern devices to keep booking courts without any problems.

It doesn't look like a pretty hard challenge, or at least by what is mentioned above, but there's one more thing: it's the first software we ever work in required to handle user payments (since obviously users would have to pay for their bookings prior to actually have the courts booked). And we're not sure on how to do it. We've considered the following options:

• Paypal - Definitively not an option. 99% of the system prospective users don't have an account, and most of them don't want to do it or simply don't know what it is.
• Debit card - Looks like the most user-satisfying choice. But there's one problem. Doing it will require programming several different methods, one for each bank, which is not pretty efficient, and will of course be more expensive, so it's not the customer preferred choice. Additionally, this adds a new problem: we've seen this kind of payment system only in webpages, which means a web-browser should be required to use it. That's two different applications for booking a tennis court? No man, that's not the way.
• SMS - Another possible choice would be having a virtual money system. Then users could buy virtual money through SMS and spend it in their bookings. This would allow the system manager to make periodic offers and gifts. But providers of this service apply some taxes. It's assumable, but a 'con' more than a 'pro'. As well, we don't know which are the best services of this kind out there, so we've got no criteria on this.

But we are not sure on what to choose. We've googled for everything, but we are being unable to find how to implement none of them (most likely because of we can't get to choose), and we don't know if something that suits us better already exists. Any advice is welcome.

Thanks.

[Nat]

Hi,
You said, that Pay Pal is not an option, but do you know, that your client can use Pay Pal without opening account with Pay Pal. Pay Pal can accept credit cards, and your client doesn't need to have an account with it. Please, find more info from their web site.

[altteam]

Nat is absolutely right, people don't have to have a PayPal account to pay via it. PayPal is the best choice and it has several options how to pay, lots of companies now use it.
Also you can consider 2CheckOut, it is like PayPal, also popular enough. We used PayPal from the beginning but faced some problems with money refunds with them, now we use 2CheckOut and satisfied with it.

[Stoyicker]

Okay thanks you both very much, I didn't know that about PayPal. The application should not consideer refunds so I don't think we have a problem with that, but I'll keep 2CheckOut as my second option in case I have some trouble.