I set up a test site and installed ecommerce last night.
It looks like the ticket if I want to sell some kind of product. What I want is to charge some of my members a membership fee. It's easy to set up the recurring payment in paypal, but then connecting that to drupal so it automatically uses the continued payment to govern their membership in a given role ... that's what I want.
The "submanage" module only receives notifications of recurring payments. It doesn't help with initiating the recurring payment. Plus, I wasn't able to find a module already there to help with this. And I find this odd, because if you're going to manage subscriptions there ought to be a way to initiate the subscription, yes?
My question is .... how?
And secondly, how to connect the subscription that's managed to governing membership in a role?
Here's what I'm thinking:-
Set up a cron task that checks for a) users who have the given role, b) do not have recurring payments. For them, initiate a request for the appropriate membership fee.
A second cron task might check if they have (b) but not (a), and automatically grant them the role.
A third element might be a user hook that, if they match the first condition (have the role but not making payments) then show them a button where they can initiate the payment.
Another element is to have waivers for allowing some users to have the role, but not make payments. This would cover people who live in countries other than the ones paypal can handle payments.