Thread

I currently use simple commerce with PayPal. But the problem is that PayPal appears to be insufficient for some/many international countries (they make it hard for people in some areas to process credit card, as far as i can tell; which may be valuable if you are shipping goods, but for a membership site, you don’t really have grave credit risk)

We are looking at amember + merchant account to complement PayPal (so the user has a choice, paypal or direct credit card). But i can’t use simple commerce for the “other option”

I would love to know how other sites are coping with this need; ie.., to offer a payment option above (in addition to) simple commerce + paypal.

Are you using amember? or something else? Thanks!

Hi David,

If Paypal has issues with processing credit card payments from certain countries then these problems may not be limited to Paypal.  Have you been getting complaints from your users?  Make sure you know which countries are restricted from paying through Paypal and that these countries are not a problem with your merchant account provider as well.

Some people have been using Javascript carts (they run browser-side) such as mentioned on this thread among many others.  Something like that may work.  This may not be much better than your other option though because you don’t get the integration of the simple commerce module.  You might explain specifically which features of the simple commerce module you are concerned about so that we can better answer how you might get around your limitations.

I have used Amember with EE before and we ended up ditching it.  There are a number of ways to integrate Amember with the site (depending on your needs) but the EE plugin that is shipped with Amember was created for EE 1.5.4 (I believe) and we found a number of quirks with it.  There is a thread floating around where someone updated the plugin but I am not sure if releasing that plugin to the wild is something the developer has considered.  You could create your own plugin as well though.  This option seems to be overkill for a small number of users so the method you pick should probably be considered along with the demand of the option.  We decided Amember was not worth the effort of doing our own customization because we were also using it as an alternative option.

Hope that helps, you might also do a search for shopping cart in these forums because there are many threads dealing with alternative methods.

Hi John,

(Good to hear from you, hope you are doing well)

Yes, my frustration with paypal is entirely based on users (potential buyers) telling me that are frustrated with it. In many cases, it is simply a long hold paypal puts on the charge (seems like several days or even week a sometimes), so in many cases the charge resolves.

Thanks for good tips and totally good advice: when customers say that can’t buy, it is frustrating, but you make me realize that i have not exactly diagnosed the range of issues in regard to paypal purchase. So, I don’t know a merchant will solve any/all. Clearly, payment issues at least run the gamut from user pilot, to interface clarity, to sometimes, the credit card isn’t good. (It’s hard to diagnose when the feedback is of the angry “your paypal sucks” sort…).

thanks for f/back on amember, that’s all i need to hear to avoid that scenario….

- David