Thread

I’ve been looking at the Simple Commerce Module and wondered if it’s possible to have a product where once purchased they are moved to a different member group for a fixed period of time, say 12 months, then they must manually renew after 12 months otherwise it moves them back to the basic membership group.

I can see it works for recurring subscriptions but I don’t want payments recurring.

Hi Euan,

You are correct in that you can get a members group to change upon purchasing an item but there is no way to move them back again unless you use the recurring payments function I’m afraid.

You could perhaps create a query to check for this and move members back after a certain amount of time. You would need to use a cron job to run that though and this would definitely then be a custom solution so we’d need to move this across to the Community Help forums to see if anyone in there has any ideas on it.

Alternatively there might be a 3rd party add-on available that could help with this. You could check on devot-ee.com to see if there’s anything there maybe?

There are quite a few e-commerce add-ons available there nowadays so you might find something there.

Does that help at all?

Thanks,

Mark

Mark

Thanks for confirming what I suspected to be the case. In all honesty it doesn’t really help (not helped by my lack of php, etc).

The only commercial option appears to be Membrr which supports subscriptions. All the e-commerce options are ‘developing’ subscription add-ons but nothing is ready for release.

Quite frustrating really given the SCM will do the job if I force people to sign up on recurring subscription but not otherwise.

Thanks,
Euan

Hi Euan,

Sorry that this is frustrating but really the Simple Commerce Module is just that in that it is quite simple.

You are welcome to post a Feature Request for this however you would still need some sort of cron job to do this as there’s no way of the member group being changed after say a year without that.

Does that make sense?

Thanks,

Mark

Mark,

I appreciate it is very simple commerce module and I believe I am looking for something simple. They buy a product, it give’s them 12 months membership (or whatever) and after it puts them back to a different member group.

I would have thought that is simpler than recurring memberships?

I understand and appreciate a cron job would be required to check if memberships have expired. How does the current system of recurring memberships in the SCM work?

Personally speaking I don’t sign up to sites, etc which have recurring memberships.

Thanks for your assistance.
Euan

Hi Euan,

Currently, the Simple Commerce Module changes a member’s group when a Subscription and Recurring Payments type of purchase is made or terminated. Both actions send an Instant Payment Notification to your website which is received by EE. EE then performs the appropriate move between member groups. With this style of payment offered by PayPal, this is actually a fairly straight-forward process. The functionality to allow one-time purchases that trigger a limited-time member group change is actually more complicated than this, so it wasn’t included in SCM. As you noted, all the e-commerce platforms for EE are working on subscriptions but don’t have anything ready to release yet. It’s not as easy as it might seem.

Hope this helps answer your questions!