Simple ecommerce options for subscription based services
Hi
I'm after what is quite a common requirement, especially nowadays where a user accesses an online web application to do some stuff but pays on a monthly basis
The idea is:
To be able to signup on the site, register their details and create a member record which gives them access to the web application free for 15 days (restricted usage)
When the 15 days are up, the user needs to pay to continue the service.
Each month thereafter, they need to pay a subscription fee to maintain their access
Problems I see are:
We need to have multiple products to purchase - effectively three (package 1, Package 2 & Package 3) plus yearly and monthly options.
To allow us to add a voucher code to apply preset discounts
Implement immediate payment option should the user want to signup straight away and pay
Setup recurring automatic subscription payments so ideally the money is taken from the account but obviously the site needs to know if someone has not paid so their account can be locked down.
Paypal is one provider we are looking at but not sure if there are any more suited.
Will the likes of Tea, uCommerce or uWebshop be the solutions for this or should we be hand rolling out our own? What I don't want to be doing is hand coding payment gateways and the like, I'd prefer to have something out of the box if a commercial product.
Any options or suggestions would be appreciated :-)
Lots of gateways will help you with the recurring payment aspect and will notify your store ongoingly about individual transactions. PayPal Subscription specically will even let you do the trial aspect as part of the sign up if you want to have billing occur automatically once the trial is up. Will probably keep more subscribers around, but lower initial subscriptions a bit, i.e. you're weeding out people unlikely to go for the paid subscription anyway.
1, 2, 3 are essentially all about the payment gateway sans the member creation process, which would be handled by your code or a commerce package.
For the issues you mention here are my thoughts:
"We need to have multiple products to purchase - effectively three (package 1, Package 2 & Package 3) plus yearly and monthly options."
PayPal supports the some of this. Basically you can put together different types of recurring intervals (and even multiple subscriptions) in one go. If you take a look at uCommerce you'll notice that we've got a class called RecurringPaymentRequest which exposes this stuff. The base products would just be content nodes or actual products, nothing to it.
To allow us to add a voucher code to apply preset discounts
PayPal Subscriptions will actually help you there too. It can do an "intual amount" kinda thing if you only wanted to discount the first month, year, whatever, and then do subsequent subscription periods at "normal" pricing. We don't expose that stuff but it's trivial to add into our provider.
The voucher/promo code functionality uCommerce can do for you via Marketing Foundation or you can roll your own and just use the uCommerce discounts without Marketing Foundation. uCommerce will still apply your discounts to orders and order lines.
Implement immediate payment option should the user want to signup straight away and pay
I would make this the default case and let set up a subscription for every customer, even for trials. It gives you one model to work with and you don't have to worry about bringing the subscriber back when the trial expires and initialize a payment flow after the fact. This is what subscription based services like Netflix and Audible do.
Setup recurring automatic subscription payments so ideally the money is taken from the account but obviously the site needs to know if someone has not paid so their account can be locked down.
That's exactly what PayPal does for you. You need to handle the recurring IPNs whenever new transactions are made for the subscriptions. The main thing to handle would be to close down subscriber access to the site. Our PayPal Subscription provider would need to be extended with this behavior as it only deals with the payment and not the member access concern that you have.
Whether a full e-commerce solution will make sense you is difficult to say. A lot of the value stems from the catalog- and order management capabilities. uCommerce Free Edition wouldn't cost you anything licensing wise, but would require a bit a additions to handle the subscription payments. The PayPal Subscription provider is included in the box, but would need a little bit of tweaking (be happy to provide you with the code).
You'd have to do everything from scractch without a platform, so I guess it comes down to whether you want to do everything yourself or have a platform that will help you some of the way and then just do the custom bits you need. I'd think order management would be a big one. You basically wouldn't have to do any coding to be able to work with your subscriptions once they're placed.
uCommerce will help you with vouchers as well, but Marketing Foundation may very well be overkill for your scenario.
Simple ecommerce options for subscription based services
Hi
I'm after what is quite a common requirement, especially nowadays where a user accesses an online web application to do some stuff but pays on a monthly basis
The idea is:
Hi Simon,
Lots of gateways will help you with the recurring payment aspect and will notify your store ongoingly about individual transactions. PayPal Subscription specically will even let you do the trial aspect as part of the sign up if you want to have billing occur automatically once the trial is up. Will probably keep more subscribers around, but lower initial subscriptions a bit, i.e. you're weeding out people unlikely to go for the paid subscription anyway.
1, 2, 3 are essentially all about the payment gateway sans the member creation process, which would be handled by your code or a commerce package.
For the issues you mention here are my thoughts:
Thanks Soren - appreciated.
Think best thing is for me to download ucommerce and give it a go to see what I can come up with
Simon
Just wondering, hows it all playing with Umbraco 6 atm?
Just wondering, hows it all playing with Umbraco 7 atm?
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