How IaaS provider can make payment more convenient: 2 simple rules

    Earlier, we have repeatedly told about our experience in optimizing internal services and the overall development of the service in the direction of increasing the convenience of working with IaaS even for those who have not encountered server administration and are far from the IT sector as a whole.

    A couple of examples:


    Today we decided to discuss the convenience of making payments for IaaS services and share our experience with various payment gateways. / Photo by Alexander Baxevanis / CC Transition to new technologies is always stressful. Often people are not ready to abandon the usual tools in favor of more effective new products. Instead of blaming them for this, it's worth figuring out the real benefits of innovation. An example is IaaS. This service did not appear yesterday, but a significant part of companies are still afraid to give control of their IT infrastructure outside. At the same time, maintaining your own server fleet is becoming an increasingly costly undertaking: you need to pay salaries to administrators and maintain your hardware.








    Our experience in introducing new products has led us to the following conclusions.

    Rule 1: Transparency


    In order for people to be able to quickly understand your product, you should think about how much you are an open company. Ease of using any functionality is a subjective concept, therefore, it will require additional work.

    From the speed of reaction to messages in social network profiles and maintaining a corporate blog, for example, on Habrahabr, to thematic guides in which simple answers are given to the most common questions, step-by-step instructions and tips for beginners are given.

    All this is necessary so that people can act independently - without calling the support service with a request to sort it out.

    One of these solutions that we decided to use was a special calculator that allows you to quickly assess the level of necessary costs for certain cloud resources. It is available for use even by non-IT professionals.

    We started by placing it on the main page of the site, but later revised this approach a little and identified three blocks of basic services for which you can get a calculation:


    Such a solution allows you to instantly establish the necessary expectations regarding the potential costs of cloud resources and make a decision on cooperation.


    / Calculator for VPS / VDS, which includes, among other things, a link to additional information - articles on the category “ Tariffing and Billing

    In addition to providing general information, openness also means prompt informing clients about failures and problems with providing the proper level of service. Similar situations are faced even by large providers, there are also technical difficulties with a payment gateway - this is exactly the problem we had to solve at the end of 2014 during the “fall” of Money Online systems.

    We were forced to inform all clients about the incident, which this malfunction could affect, and offer other options for resolving the situation. In addition, we quickly explored alternative payment gateways and started connecting them.

    And here we come to the second rule.

    Rule 2: “This is a developer problem”


    Sophisticated interface, technical problems, high degree of support service loading - all this does not bother your customers. Few people are interested in understanding the details of the structure of your business processes and all kinds of difficulties associated with the work of your IT specialists.

    Difficulties with the Money Online payment gateway prompted us to analyze alternative options. We started with PayPal. It was also chosen due to the presence of a significant flow of foreign customers who would like to pay for our services using this service.

    An independent study of the documentation showed that working with the PayPal API requires numerous “dances” you know what. PayPal support service refused to help and suggest a way out of the situation, so the completion of the integration setup required us various tricks from the development point of view. One way or another, we entered into a direct agreement and safely added PayPal as a new payment method.

    Next, we started connecting Robokassa, a more familiar gateway for the Russian-language segment of the Network. It was not without similar difficulties, but communication with colleagues from Robokassa allowed us to eliminate a number of outdated descriptions in the API documentation and move on. As a result, this payment gateway was successfully configured.

    As we use these gateways, we made sure that they complement the “Money Online” well and insure the situation in case of next technological difficulties. Nevertheless, we considered other options that potential partners offered us.

    That is how we began cooperation with the PayMaster payment system, which offered us favorable terms on commission and a very convenient API. At the moment, we have set up all available PayMaster integrations and plan to use this payment gateway as the main one (including with the possibility of connecting recurring payments).



    The technological impeccability of service and the availability of all systems is a critical factor. The absence of failures and the availability of alternative tools allows us not to deal with situational micromanagement of certain problems with payment (although earlier we had to repeatedly “enter the situation” and extend the service for a number of clients during failures on the side of the payment gateway).

    Such nuances may not affect your revenue the first time you enter them, but they will necessarily change the attitude of your customers to what you do for their convenience. It is this approach that allows us to talk about trust, which serves as a starting point for stable and long-term growth of the company.

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