anne

I was wondering what would be the best way to manage a subscription service. I'm probably going to be using a custom CMS, and I'd like a way to verify that a user has paid, and automate upgrading their access level.

Is there an easy way to integrate this with my CMS? Has anyone done this before? Most solutions I've seen require you to manually add the user to the right group.

stevo

What sort of subscription is it?

Is paypal out of the question?

anne

Paypal isn't out of the question, but I'd like to offer credit / debit cards directly as well - I'm targetting a demographic that is unlikely to want to have to jump through hoops and create an account elsewhere just to pay for something.

If its easy to do with paypal then thats a start though!

Super Mod

You will probably want to set up some sort of custom CMS. You can set up PayPal subscriptions, but if you want to take credit cards then you're going to want to build some sort of automatic service. What I do is send out a notice three days before billing a credit card customer and then run a service every morning that charges the people that haven't cancelled their subscription.

anne

Thats a nice way of doing it Spencer.

How do you handle the first signups? Do you just activate their accounts manually? I would prefer to have it done automatically, but having little experience of handling online transactions I'm not sure how easy that is to set up.

If you can pass details to a credit card service, and have them return a value to your server to say the transaction was successful, then I guess its easy enough to set up - just I have no idea if that kind of service is easy to get hold of *g*

Baby Boy

Great idea too Spencer, don't forget, Authorize.Net has an automation built in addon I believe they can do that too, try and check into it.