Thread

PayPal has a service which handles recurring billing completely on their side. Basically this PayPal service is like the one-time billing service only when the customer enters in their information they are billed in a cycle rather than just once (description of the service). I think Simple Commerce Module should work with this service but I wanted to ask the experts to make doubly sure before I take my client down this road.

Thank you for providing such a wonderful product,

Sam

Hey Sam.

Currently the simple commerce module can’t handle recurring payments without modifying the code, or some fancy use of hooks, so I’m sorry, but at this point, the simple commerce module isn’t abe to accommodate this.

Thanks for the kind words.

But EE doesn’t have to handle the recurring payment in this case. This is a service totally on PayPal’s side. I don’t understand how EE would have to keep track of anything. All EE has to do is “hand off the customer” to my client’s PayPal account. Then PayPal handles the recurring payment, not EE. Is the answer still the same then???

Thank you,

Sam

Sam, it’s been awhile since I checked, but I believe the main issue is that the data PayPal wants for a recurring payment item is quite a bit different from a standard purchase, and is where you’d find the need for modifying the code somewhat.  You could still create store items associated to weblog entries, and possibly even utilize the IPN features, but the Simple Commerce Purchase tag would not be able to generate the proper purchase links for you.  You would need to either create them manually, or again, modify the module to be able to output these types of items.

Ah, I see the problem isn’t as simple as I had hoped. Maybe I’ll dig around on google to see how hard it is to get the SCM to work with PayPal’s subscription service.

Thanks all,
Sam