When evaluating billing solutions, companies have a lot of information to sort through and little help to do so.  After talking with countless merchants, I’ve found that companies typically fall into two categories during their search – startup or veteran.  Startup companies aren’t necessarily those who just launched their business,  but any company that is bringing a new product to market and lacks pre-existing infrastructure or payment expertise falls into this category.  Veterans have built a system at least once before and are very aware of the pitfalls and the overall payments ecosystem.

Startup companies should spend the time to educate themselves on the industry – payments and billing are complex and outright confusing.  The diagram below shows the many different pieces of a complete billing infrastructure.

The systems above are involved when  a customer makes their purchase until the transaction is submitted to the customer’s bank (that issued the credit card or funds the payment source) and eventually money ends up in the companies bank account.  A further description of these systems, and how outsourced billing systems add value are after the jump.

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