Thread

I’m almost on-board here, and I appreciate the efforts of people (more than you know) who have addressed my previous questions.

Okay,

So, to rehash, here’s my goal: to build a simple subscription-based site where different levels of subscribers can access different levels of site content—a basic subscription site. Whatever subscription she or he chooses, the subscriber’s credit card should billed the same each month with the system. I’ve heard EE+aMember+PayPal can do what I want. But I can’t buy any of it until I know it’s possible.

The questions:

1. I want to use EE + aMember + PayPal to get the above done, in your time on the forum have you heard if other Expression Engine users have done this without heavy customization?

2. What PayPal service have you heard most Expression Engine users buy to accomplish recurring billing? For example I know PayFlow Pro does *not* jive well with EE+aMember. But there seems some other recurring solution from PayPal *does* jive. Do you know the specific name of that? Please don’t ask me to call PayPal’s “support” #8-)

Thank You,
Sam

LOL- yep, can’t blame you for wanting to avoid Paypal support.  I haven’t used aMember, but I know folks who have.  Let’s see if I can round someone up.  And this might be a good one to ask on aMember support as well- looks like they’d actually be handling the transactions, so I don’t know that it would be an EE issue as much as an aMember issue.  But- I’ll ask some folks who I know have used aMember with EE- see if they have any input.

Thanks Robin for that advice,

I did contact aMember support and they gave me one of my two answers just now. They answered my question about what PayPal service to get to accomplish recurring billing for my EE site. They say “you need PayPal Standard account and enable paypal_r plugin in aMember.” So far so good. The remaining question is really… is that as easy as it is rumoured to be? If you could find one of the folks you know to come on here and say “yeah the integration works as advertised… you set up aMember then set up EE and paypal and it’s a bowl of cherries from there” then that would be really helpful to me and possibly others. Or if maybe they have some advice on what pitfalls to avoid.

Hugs,

Sam

Hey Sam.

There’s a wiki article on aMember integration that you’ve probably seen (but maybe not).  If you browse these forums (search on “aMember” you’ll get lots of results of people trying to do what you’re doing, but as you rightly guessed, nothing is ever “that easy” at the end of the day 😉

What is your background?  Are you a PHP person?  Without at least intermediate experience with PHP, you might find a few deadends in attempting the integration.  Like Robin, I’ve not used aMember, so we’ll keep trying to find you a user who has.

We’re using it on a site in development and as far as I know it’s working very well.  Colly’s dealing with the aMember stuff though so I can’t offer much advice.  I’ll point him towards this thread but he’s swamped in work this week so don’t expect an immediate response (unless we catch him on a tea break).

Derek, thank you, I have read that aMember integration page and I have it bookmarked for when I actually purchase aMember. I think overall I’m getting the impression that aMember integration is relatively easy.

smallbeer, That’s comforting, thank you. I’m gathering integration is easy but not often talked about.

The biggest questions I have remaining are really small I think
1. Let’s say a member wants to cancel their subscription on our site. We would like a cancel button on *our* site. Is that realistic?
2. Does anyone have a URL of a site that uses aMember + EE + PayPal?

Extreme gratefulness,
Sam

Jamie (Smallbeer) is right - I’m barely stopping to eat, nevermind have tea, but he pointed me at this thread. I’ll write more about Amember once we get this job out the door.

To question 1, the answer is Yes. based on what the user does through Amember, they can be shunted in and out of any Member groups you set up in EE, thus ensuring you retain EE-based control on most of the functionality and privileges.

Don’t know about question 2 - ours will be live in about three weeks. Can’t let you in before that.

No idea about integrating PayPal.

Amember is great, but a built-in EE solution would have meant I might have got some sleep this week. As I say, in about a month (sorry) I’ll be free to write a tutorial or something.

Thanks so much for all of the answers and advice. I just finished the site, http://www.tickerville.com, and I got amember pro and ee to work together. I won’t kid you, for me getting amember installed and configured with EE was no piece of cake but with the help of these forums and minorly their forums and support I through okay. I may or may not run into issues (we just launched today) but so far it’s looking pretty good and it’s working well.

The answers to my questions I found to be:
1. Not really if you are wanting to do it easily. Really it’s not best to set it up the way I was asking anyway. The “normal” way is much easier.
2. I did some digging and found some easily, I won’t repost because of confidentially, but my own project is http://www.tickerville.com which is an example of amember and EE