I’m having a really hard time trying to find something simple and suitable for charging with Expression Engine. I don’t need anything fancy but just a simple way to charge and build on that. Cartthrob is out of the question not only because of the pricing but because its suitable for a store shipping products.
The best I can find is Subscriptions from EE Harbor but the documentation on the site is pretty poor.
On the images the list PayPal as option, but I cannot find anything in the documentation or description. Does this indeed support PayPal and Stripe for billing?
From the description, it also seems to work in a very strange way. It fixes customers to a specific payment option? Example, if one has Stripe he can’t then pay another invoice with PayPal later on? This seems very strange.
The site claims to have hooks to trigger actions, but I cannot find them in the documentation either.
Let met try to explain what I need:
A member can buy something, like a subscription or one time payment. The time, month, week, etc does not need to be fixed as I would rather just bill them with a cron.
But the member should be able to store his card token with Stripe and mange this billing setting as well see charges and invoices. He should be able to pay manually with Stripe or PayPal.
The system does not need to auto bill. As I said, I need to bill different stuff a different interval, I would just prefer to have a manual cron and tell the module “Bill this X member for this invoice”, and the module will just charge this card or generate the proper invoice so the person can log in and pay.
I’m not entirely sure how this module works or I can modify it. I would also like at least an offline option. That way the user can check out manually and select that option and I can mark the invoice or order as paid manually, useful for other type of payments.
The only thing Expression Engine has is the Simple Commerce module which would seem what I need except this seems very poor in terms of what it does. I don’t even think it can create PayPal subscriptions, and being PayPal only it also seems pretty useless.
Its surprising that there is no simple way to just bill for something with Expression Engine. Every other CMS has integrations for payments systems and billing stuff, even if they are very simple. Cart Throb seems overkill and I would also need an extra add-on on top to bill for subscription or non-tangible items. Not to mention, I would have to remove most things since I don’t sell physical products.
Something like Onmnipay but for Expression Engine would be ideal. At least for the most widely used payment options.
In the past we had more options. Is CartThrob the only real ecommerce solution today?
There should be a number of options. First, Paypal takes credit cards so that should be an option… I’m using the simple commerce addon with paypal to take ticket sales, sponsorships, donations, etc. and it works well. There are a number of ways to configure it.
You could also check out Reinos’s plugins… he has a Cart-type one and a payment plugin - “Simple Store”… he also has a “Simple Cart”. all are simple and intended for people that CartThrob is too much for.
CartThrob will have a lite version coming out soon
I know a lot of people use the EEHarbor Charge Add-on so I would think it will do most stuff
Hopefully that helps. R
Generally speaking we encourage people to go with Charge for this type of thing.
Indeed, Charge seems to be what I want. Just be able to manually run some cron template and charge a specific user.
But Charge only seems limited to Stripe right now. I also need PayPal. Having 2 different systems for payments would be very awkward to users. Ideally I would like to create a simple template page on EE on which they can select the payment option and pay. I would then store their receipts or transactions separately. I don’t need a shopping cart since my billing is very simple as just clicking a payment button. All I need is a module that can bill and store users’ payment options, like in Stripe, their credit card tokens for billing and they can add or update existing cards.
I could use something like Onmnipay library in PHP or try to code the payment API’s manually, but this seems like a ton of work when most CMS and software already have at least a simple payment library or module integrated to manage payments.
About the PayPal option to take credit cards. I don’t use that option. People that pay with PayPal use their existing connected bank accounts or have a positive balance already. I use PayPal for PayPal payments only. And Stripe for cards. The main reason is they support more countries and I don’t want to confuse users. Most users interchange payments at different times. Sometimes they use a card to pay but then use PayPal, then switch back to their stored card. This is the main reason I need something that works with both.
To generate an order or invoice manually, the user can then go to that form and select the payment option. For other users I need to automatically apply their payments (cron), this obviously only works for Stripe but for PayPal they can create a PayPal subscription and PayPal has the IPN notification back to the module that can mark that invoice/order as paid.
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