I started Candy Japan in summer of 2011 with the idea of mailing Japanese sweets to subscribers around the world on a twice-monthly basis. It worked.

How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control

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2024-11-17 12:30:05

I started Candy Japan in summer of 2011 with the idea of mailing Japanese sweets to subscribers around the world on a twice-monthly basis. It worked. Hundreds of people signed up through PayPal and we kept sending them crazy Japanese candy for years.

Not everyone is a big fan of PayPal. Imagined threat or not, it seemed risky to have all subscriptions depending on it. For these reasons I wanted it to be possible to sign up directly with a credit card as well. Just a form on the site where people could enter their payment details.

Back then it was still a fair bit of work to find a suitable credit card processor to accept payments directly on your site (unlike now). I spent a ton of time going through different options, finally finding the magic payment combination that got me the form I wanted.

When I finally got things set up, I was so happy we went to the beach and celebrated it with fireworks. My understanding of how to charge cards at this point was "slap a Recurly widget on your site and call it a day".

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