Thread

To me, the most desirable feature for an e-commerce module would be that it would integrate with EE’s membership module.

I’m looking for a solution that offers subscriptions to the site (with pricing model that supports various timeframes, i.e.: subscribe for $2.99 a month, $7.49 for three months or $24.99 for a full year). Paid membership would then move members to a different group that would provide access to exclusive content.

@Jolle,

FoxEE and FoxyCart are working at creating an integrated membership management solution.

Also, there is always aMember and this has recently got better as there is a new module available that makes the integration seamless. However, you have to buy aMember at $174, the aMember EE plugin at $40 (I think) and the new EE third party module at ~$80. So, a tad expensive upfront. However, there are no monthly fees to pay. Not sure if recurring payments are a rquirement for you, but there are also recurring payments solutions with aMember that store the credit card data with the payment provider, so pci compliance issues can be avoided…. whether that is available or not depends on the payment provider you go with. With my “not so extensive research”, it is apparently available with authorize.net, bean stream, Worldpay, and paypal standard.

Anyway, the new EE third party module is for sale at: http://www.ee-addons.com/products/smartMember-EE-Module.html

Shannon, thanks so much for your reply. Quite wonderful that there is actually something to choose from!

What I find slighty tricky is the co-dependence between the various parties. If at one point, one of the product providers decides to call it a day and stop providing version updates, then how much hassle would you looking at? For instance: are membership paid subscription statuses tracked in the membership module or at the payment service provider?

For that reason alone –as paid subscription membership is a feature that not only involves security but also absolutely requires some sort of guarantee in continuity– I feel that the best route would be a First Party (EllisLabs) module, or a certified Third Party module.

If EllisLabs is indeed not actively planning or working on such a feature, at the very least it would be a good thing if EllisLabs –and this may already be the case– provided developers with an API that at least left the subscription status on EE’s membership side, making switching between these various payment systems a smooth ride.

Hi Jolle,

Your concern is certainly a valid one. This was one of the main criteria we examined when we decided to create FoxEE. I personally flew out to California to meet Brett and the team at FoxyCart to make sure that we could work together to develop a great product for the ExpressionEngine community. Since then our teams have been working together on our roadmaps and feature sets to ensure our continued success.

One major advantage of using the FoxEE module to integrate with FoxyCart, as compared with just using their tags, is the fact that we extend the weblog module and the member module to provide true integration with EE. We also utilize self contained information and product handling inside FoxEE where ever possible as opposed to relying on a third party server to hold your content. This allows us to offer many more options when displaying your products and tracking sales.

We are in the process of developing the next release of FoxEE which takes advantage of FoxyCarts new shared auth. capabilities. This will provide true sharing of membership information, including passwords, between the two systems. You can read more about FoxEE HERE.

@Jolle

I absolutely agree with you! This has been one of the number one issues I have with EE. A fairly robust eCommerce module which includes support for paid, recurring memberships and secure downloads is needed absolutely. It doesn’t have to be as complex as Magento. If you need that, use Magento and not EE. But, Simple Commerce is too simple. And, being a content managment package, it can be assumed that some content could command a price either in subscriptions or downloads. Without a module to support this sort of thing, it makes EE a bit difficult to use in quite a lot of situations. This paid membership aspect has left me feeling I have to roll my own…. and my PHP skills are developing, but not quite up to the task yet.

That and support for a member being allowed to be in multiple member groups would make EE perfect for me.

Hi Michael,

Sounds like FoxEE/FoxyCart is a well thought out combination, good to hear the two are developed in active collaboration, very glad to hear that. Just the term ‘roadmaps’ makes me happy 😊

I’ll be reading all of the documentation on the FoxEE site, looks interesting to say the least. What I am missing at first glance is the option for pricing models but also ‘special offers’ such as ‘up until june 30th, new members get 50% off’.

Still, looks very, very interesting!

@Shannon

Exactly! To me, subscription is an extension of membership and *should* therefore be a native module.

Don’t get me started in the multiple group membership, absolutely required, especially in MSM installations but just as easily in singular installations. I can only assume this is just around the corner and would be disappointed if it wasn’t. All these things are features I value beyond EE2.0. Unless they are part of that release, in which case I’ll be shutting up now 😉

I’m hoping and praying that EE2.0 at the very least allows multiple group membership… as well as some good hooks to allow easier development of a subscription module to integrate with various payment processors.

Am looking for something that does Affiliates and Coupon Codes for selling Memberships to a couple of EE sites I’m working on.

Euan, aMember handles both affiliate tracking and coupon codes.  aMember

Thanks for the reply.

I’ve taken a good look at aMember and I’d ideally like to try and keep the membership/payment element within EE/SCM but that may not be wholly possible.

I need to take a closer look at what’s the best solution.

Well I think I’ve managed to get a Coupon type system running for my site. It’s not perfect but should do the job.

Sounds like FoxEE/FoxyCart is a well thought out combination, good to hear the two are developed in active collaboration, very glad to hear that. Just the term ‘roadmaps’ makes me happy 😊

I’ll be reading all of the documentation on the FoxEE site, looks interesting to say the least. What I am missing at first glance is the option for pricing models but also ‘special offers’ such as ‘up until june 30th, new members get 50% off’.

Still, looks very, very interesting!

Foxee allows you set membership subscriptions by any length down to 1 day. You can also have recurring billing on a set subscription length. So a 1 year subscription billed monthly, till it ends.

You can offer discounts and coupons per member group and send out custom html email that include a couple dozen available tags to dynamically insert the users info.

Oh yeah, and you can do anonymous - one time checkout also.

I know this is a bit of an old thread but I thought I’d throw in my development work that I’ve recently added to the OpenSource community. Total Shop UK eCommerce is based on CI v1.7.2 and has lots of features but at the same time is lightweight. Ajax functionality, SEO optimised, PayPal payment system built in for ease of use and much more..

Download - http://sourceforge.net/projects/totalshopuk/files/

Live Demo - http://www.totalshopuk.com

All feedback is welcome!

Since we’re bringing back up dead topics… It’s amusing for me to see that pretty much everything I was thinking about, and talking about a few years ago is the system that we managed to bring to completion with CartThrob.  If you review this thread, you can see that I’ve been thinking about the approach we took for a long time. I think we started building out parts of CartThrob all the way back when this thread started and slowly built it up over time.

Anyway, now I’m going off to mine this thread for feature requests. 😉