It looks like uCommerce is a great product, kudos.
My specific need is in a paid membership site. We have a site where premium content is available for paid members.
A typical scenario is that we use a marketing campaign to encourage potential customers to join a two week free trial. At the end of that time if they choose they can become full members of the site for a fee. That fee is then billed each month to the customer. The customer may cancel at any time and they will stilll have access to the site through the period they have paid for.
Does uCommerce have the ability to directly integrate into site membership in Umbraco? Can it automaticly manage enabling/disabling premium memberships based on payment, including the possibility of a failed transaction? Can it manage a membership cancelation process?
I apreciate any answers you can give. I am very interested in seeing if uCommerce would meet our needs. If not are there any other packages you would direct me too?
The renewals would ideally be automatic based on stored information. In a previous life I was the CIO for a credit Card processing company and am very familiar with the security requirements and PCI standards for doing this. We have also considered doing the recurring billing through PayPal or a similar service. Many CC procesors have the ability to store a Credit Card numbers for use in recurring billing. That is handy because it takes the risk of having a customers credit card number hacked off your shoulders.
The general rule for the system to follow would be to bill for services each month unless the service is canceled by the customer. This would be part of the origional agreement by the customer. Anually a re-affirmation of that agreement would be made, but that doesn't need to happen inside the commerce package.
Any time a customer has a succesful payment of the service their membership would be allowed full access to the premium portion of the site until Day X, at which point the billing process would happen again. If the transaction fails or the customer cancels their subscription they would need to have the access rights taken away after their fully paid for period of time.
We have something like this built into uCommerce. The premise is that recurring billing is handled on the payment gateway. One of the built-in providers in uCommerce connects to the PayPal Subscription services, sets up the subscripts, and leaves PayPal to handle it from there.
Currently the provider is only set up to create the subscription, handling of subsequent notifications when the subscription changes will have to be added. It's a matter of overriding the existing code and adding what you need.
uCommerce exposes relevant web endpoints to support it so it'll be a trivial matter to hook into the endpoint and handle local subscription maintenance via pipelines for example.
A couple of the payment gateways supported out of the box works asynchronously, which is pretty much the same that you need. Google Checkout for example will come back when payment is authorized at some point, close to but not synchrosnous to the actual request. uCommerce will wait around for the call.
Same thing for MultiSafepay in the Netherlands, which will actually pass back multiple calls to the endpoint based on the customer's actions remotely, e.g. indication tha that a bank transfer was made, that the customer cancelled, etc.. This last example is the closest to what you're trying to do.
Doug - hello - I'd be very interested to hear whether uCommerce worked for your membership site. I have a membership site that I need to create and I was thinking of using uCommerce ... did it work ?
Using uCommerce for Membership Site
Hello
It looks like uCommerce is a great product, kudos.
My specific need is in a paid membership site. We have a site where premium content is available for paid members.
A typical scenario is that we use a marketing campaign to encourage potential customers to join a two week free trial. At the end of that time if they choose they can become full members of the site for a fee. That fee is then billed each month to the customer. The customer may cancel at any time and they will stilll have access to the site through the period they have paid for.
Does uCommerce have the ability to directly integrate into site membership in Umbraco? Can it automaticly manage enabling/disabling premium memberships based on payment, including the possibility of a failed transaction? Can it manage a membership cancelation process?
I apreciate any answers you can give. I am very interested in seeing if uCommerce would meet our needs. If not are there any other packages you would direct me too?
Thanks,
Doug
Thank you for the compliment. Much appreciated! :)
Is the billing handled automatically by debiting the customer's credit card or do they enter their payment information for each renewal?
The renewals would ideally be automatic based on stored information. In a previous life I was the CIO for a credit Card processing company and am very familiar with the security requirements and PCI standards for doing this. We have also considered doing the recurring billing through PayPal or a similar service. Many CC procesors have the ability to store a Credit Card numbers for use in recurring billing. That is handy because it takes the risk of having a customers credit card number hacked off your shoulders.
The general rule for the system to follow would be to bill for services each month unless the service is canceled by the customer. This would be part of the origional agreement by the customer. Anually a re-affirmation of that agreement would be made, but that doesn't need to happen inside the commerce package.
Any time a customer has a succesful payment of the service their membership would be allowed full access to the premium portion of the site until Day X, at which point the billing process would happen again. If the transaction fails or the customer cancels their subscription they would need to have the access rights taken away after their fully paid for period of time.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Thanks for expanding on your requirements.
We have something like this built into uCommerce. The premise is that recurring billing is handled on the payment gateway. One of the built-in providers in uCommerce connects to the PayPal Subscription services, sets up the subscripts, and leaves PayPal to handle it from there.
Currently the provider is only set up to create the subscription, handling of subsequent notifications when the subscription changes will have to be added. It's a matter of overriding the existing code and adding what you need.
uCommerce exposes relevant web endpoints to support it so it'll be a trivial matter to hook into the endpoint and handle local subscription maintenance via pipelines for example.
A couple of the payment gateways supported out of the box works asynchronously, which is pretty much the same that you need. Google Checkout for example will come back when payment is authorized at some point, close to but not synchrosnous to the actual request. uCommerce will wait around for the call.
Same thing for MultiSafepay in the Netherlands, which will actually pass back multiple calls to the endpoint based on the customer's actions remotely, e.g. indication tha that a bank transfer was made, that the customer cancelled, etc.. This last example is the closest to what you're trying to do.
Hope this helps.
Doug - hello - I'd be very interested to hear whether uCommerce worked for your membership site. I have a membership site that I need to create and I was thinking of using uCommerce ... did it work ?
Drop me a note - thanks - Hugh
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