Since I’m such a fan of Shopify, I was thrilled when Jesse Storimer approached me about releasing a Rails Kit that would help Rails developers build a Shopify application for the Shopify Platform, a platform for developers to offer apps that can extend the functionality of Shopify for store owners. Jesse proposed offering a ready-made application that shows you just how easy it is to hook into Shopify-hosted stores and use the Shopify-powered billing system. And Jesse has done a bang-up job!

Check out the newest addition to the Rails Kits family — the Shopify App Rails Kit. It’s an insanely easy way to build a SaaS application targeted at people who are already using Shopify to sell their products. You get authentication, billing, and access to your customers’ Shopify data, all throught the Shopify API, and you get help with marketing your app via the Shopify Application Store. It has never been easier to get your web app into the hands of paying customers, so try the Shopify App Rails Kit today!

When an email comes in to your support alias, or when one of your customers enters a support request via your web form, a ticket is created with the user’s info and the details of their support request. If you get a lot of users submitting support requests all about the same problem (say you are running a Facebook application, you just broke something, and 100 people file tickets on it at the same time), then you may find yourself buried in a sea of tickets. If you can fix all the problems with one code update, why not be able to close all the support tickets for that problem with one update, too?

With the new issues feature of the Helpdesk Rails Kit you can. Now you can assign any number of tickets to an issue, and when you make updates to that issue, everyone who filed a ticket that is now associated with that issue get the update. Now you can fix your broken feature, deploy an update, and close all the tickets at once, letting all your effected customers know that the problem has been solved. You get to save yourself your time, and each of your customers still gets a personalized response.

If you haven’t already checked out the Helpdesk Kit, now is a great time to do it. For the price of a single user license for some other support system applications, you get an unlimited license to a Rails-based support system that you can optionally integrate directly into your existing Ruby on Rails application.

Check it out, and get your mapping on!

I’m also delighted to announce that this is the first Rails Kit authored by someone other than me! Jacques Crocker has done all the heavy lifting on this one, and he’s done a bang-up job. Jacques was one of the first customers for the SaaS Rails Kit, so it’s been doubly enjoyable to work with him on this Kit.

If you’d like to publish a Kit at Rails Kits, feel free to get in touch. Or, if you just have an idea for Kit, and you’d like me to build it, let me know about that, too.

With this Kit you get support for multiple tiers of access, periodic billing, and user account self-signup and cancellation. The Kit hooks into the Radiant administration interface, so restricting your content to only paid members is as simple as clicking a checkbox when editing a page.

You can also set the pricing to be free, in case you don’t want to charge for your content but you do want to restrict it to only people who have registered at your site.

To get a quick start on building a membership site with paid content using Ruby on Rails, check out the CMS Rails Kit now!

Connecting to the Authorize.net payment gateway is as easy as any of the other supported gateways. Once you have your Authorize.net account with CIM activated, simply drop in the API login credentials into the gateway configuration file, specify the authorize_net_cim gateway in the application configuration file, and start the sample application. You’ll then be up and running with a bare-bones Rails application that can handle self-service account creations, upgrades and downgrades, the collecting of payment information, and automated recurring billing.

When your application is built on the SaaS Rails Kit, your customers can choose whether to provide payment info via a credit card of via PayPal. If your customer chooses PayPal, he is redirected to PayPal to create a billing agreement for your service, and then is redirected back to your application. By using the API provided by Website Payments Standard (the basic business plan offered by PayPal), your Rails application can make charges on demand against these billing agreements, just as it does for those customers who are paying with credit cards. There’s no additional setup required, beyond providing your PayPal credentials in the config file.

To help celebrate this new functionality, I’m offering a 10% discount on the SaaS Rails Kit… use the discount code “paypal” during checkout before July 15th to get the discount.

If you have a particular gateway you would like to have supported by the Kit, feel free to get in touch to let me know and I’ll take a look at adding it.

First, let me say that my experience using them for my gateway for Catch the Best has been fantastic. I originally chose another merchant account provider and gateway, but then switched to Braintree for the gateway when my first gateway wasn’t quite working out. I did keep the merchant account from my first provider, though, and Braintree did a great job of getting their gateway talking to it without any fuss. Since that can sometimes be a hair-pulling experience, I was glad for that. Before, during, and after the transition, they have been ultra-responsive and helpful in getting me squared away with my CC processing.

Others have had a similar experience. Robby recently blogged about his experience with Braintree, and praised them all-around. His experience was a lot like mine, actually, in that I used to always go to TrustCommerce, but have found them to be less than responsive in the last year or so. Bryan at Braintree, at the other hand, always goes out of his way to be helpful. How many CEOs of CC processing companies are willing to work with you one-on-one to make sure everything goes smoothly for you, like Bryan does?

And, if you need a further endorsement, Cody Fauser used Braintree as his example gateway in his ActiveMerchant PeepCode PDF. You can’t argue with that!

So, rest easy, Braintree is fantastic. I invite you to find out for yourself. Just ping them about whatever payment processing question you have, and I’m sure they’ll be happy to help. Then, once you’re settled on that, come back and buy the SaaS Rails Kit to save yourself the time and hassle of writing recurring billing code for your Ruby on Rails application.

Update: As of October 2008, Braintree now may apply monthly minimums if your annual volume is less than $1 million per year.  If you are just starting out, you’ll want to compare those fees to the costs of using Authorize.net CIM — support for which has been added to the SaaS Rails Kit since this blog post was originally written.

The first Rails Kit is the Software as a Service Rails Kit, which provides you a complete subscription management and recurring billing solution, right out of the box. This full Rails application, based on work I’ve done for myself and various clients, is well-tested and is ready to be a quick start for building your hosted web service.  Get it today!