Recurring subscription payments PayPal

Question

Sorry if this is longwinded but I'm trying to add a recurring subscription option to site but want to prepare for future headaches. We have a good core following on a statewide news magazine site. For now I want to implement PayPal's Enhanced Recurring Payments option for subscriptions as I just found out users won't need a PayPal account. This will allow for monetary support and for the moment people won't have to hastle with signing up. But in the future I'd like to wall off some content and make membership mandatory for those areas. What would be the foreseeable problems at a later date if I implemented Solspace's User with PayPal recurring payments and using if statements to wall off content? Would I be able to transfer those people that initially sign up for a recurring subscription to the later setup, which would require membership? Or would I just have to tell people to cancel membership and re-sign up at that time?

BTW, I've researched Membrr, CartThrob, and Charge... and right now, the paypal option for the additional $20/month seems well worth it in light of some of the things i've heard about the other options. Nothing negative on Charge, but more trouble than I want to invest in right now.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Regarding Solspacer User & Paypal... The Solspace User module brings membership forms into normal templates. That will be separate from anything you are doing with Paypal & payments.

I believe you & I have emailed before about adding a pay wall to your EE site... Here's a new non EE option that I found recently: TinyPass. If it works as described on their site, it's a great option for adding paid content to a site.

Answer 2

We are using solspace User and are in the process of implementing the Simple Commerce Module. User uses the same member groups as usual in Exp Eng so our plan is to move members into a new member group (i.e. "Subscribers") when they purchase a subscription item in SCM.

If you're not concerned with look and feel then you can just as easily use the Exp Eng built-in member functions that work just as well instead of purchasing, installing, and setting up templates with User.

I've run into a snag with SCM (posted here: Why does simple commerce module not update member group upon successful completion of the transaction? ) where the member group is not automatically updating upon purchase but otherwise this seems like a good plan and seems to be working so far.

The other part of this of course is that your page templates need to have code in them that checks a member's group and displays content accordingly...

{if member_group == '5'}some content{/if}