By Zach Harkey on

The e-commerce module's info page says:

New for 4.6 - subscriptions and recurring payments

Is this true recurring payments, or just recurring invoicing?

With true recurring payments the customer should subscribe and make one single payment, after which the subscriber's credit card or paypal account will be automatically billed on a recurring basis until they cancel their subscription, meaning the customer does not have to go sign in and approve or make the payment each month.

Comments

Dublin Drupaller’s picture

Dublin Drupaller commented

HI Zach,

I was using that the other day and as far as I can see...it's just an invoicing feature that automatically sends email reminders and assigns/disables a User Role Type for that user. It's not a *true* recurring payment system.

It's useful if you have a 12 month payment for a site, for example, and the users pay throughout the year...i.e. it's a handy way of tracking who has to pay what when.

For a large scale membership site I can see it being a pain, as if you have more than one membership (role) type you have to manually upgrade/downgrade a users status.

There is another paypal subscriptions module which is seperate from the ecommerce.module suite that is specifically for (paid) subscriptions to a site that uses paypal. I haven't tried it yet...but it looks more promising than the recurring payments feature of the ecommerce suite...which is good and useful, but the whole ecommerce suite has got very clunky and extremely difficult to navigate for site admins.

That's no criticism to the guys who put it together..it's just gotten very big an unwiedly.

Hope that helps

Dub

Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate

sami_k’s picture

sami_k commented

In order to do something like this you would have to store the credit card number, right? If so, that's in general a very bad idea.

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Zach Harkey’s picture

Zach Harkey commented

Paypal will store the credit card number. They already have true recurring payments and subscriptions available and they work great. The best part about them is that the payments are automatic each month. I wish this module would take advantage of that.

I'm going to check into the paypal subscriptions module.

-zach
------------------------
harkey design

: z

sami_k’s picture

sami_k commented

Sounds good to me :) I should check that out at some point here.

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Walt Esquivel’s picture

Walt Esquivel commented

...and what did you find out about the PayPal subscriptions module? What have you used, if anything, for your solution since your post dated September 25, 2005?

Thanks in advance!

Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
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kae’s picture

kae commented

I'm keeping a log of successes and problems with paypal subscriptions at node 44295

In Jan. 06 I emailed Gorden (maintainer). He said no version of ecomm will do recurring debits, only recurring invoicing.

Christoph C. Cemper’s picture

Christoph C. Cemper commented

>>>He said no version of ecomm will do recurring debits, only recurring invoicing.

Why? that's actualyl what we need - recurring debits via WorldPay , that doesn't mean we have to store CC cards