Someone running EE Harbor Subscriptions?
News and General
Can someone that is running this add-on try to help me out with some questions. I cannot seem to figure this out after looking at the screenshots and reading the docs 10 times. There is no way to demo this without having to purchase the add-on.
If someone had this add-on and is using it, please help me out. I suspect only someone using this can know the answers.
In the screenshots, PayPal is listed, but in the docs it tells it’s not supported or in testing. Which one is it? Can users pay or not with PayPal? If PayPal is supposed, does it support IPN, notify back to the invoice that the charge was successful?
Can a user pay an invoice with Stripe or PayPal or only one option? Basic example, invoice A is generated and user paid with Stripe. The next month invoice B is generated and user wants to pay with PayPal. Is this possible?
The docs say something that payment option is locked, which seems awkward.
Can a user pay with one card one month and pay with another, the next month?
I want the module to handle the subscriptions, not create a Stripe subscription and let Stripe handle it. That means, I want EE to bill with a cron each month, or week or the period I have set.
What billing periods are supported? I assume this depends on how offend the cron is executed. But what if I want to bill someone once a day? But another person once a month?
Can I only create subscriptions billing? Or can I also create a one time payment? Example: I want a product that is billed just once or a single time.
Can I bill or create an invoice without a specific product? Example: I just want to run the cron or charge a user a specific XX$ amount, one time, but necessarily create a product just for that because maybe it was just an extra service and having to create a product for every custom charge would fill the products’ page with garbage data.
To resume, what if I want to just create an invoice and charge manually on a specific account. Is this possible?
Let’s see if we can figure out whether it’s a good fit for you.
- It does not currently support paypal. 2/3. Pay with a different vendor each month? It’s not like it sends an invoice and then you pay. It’s automatic, it’s going to charge the card associated with the subscription. You can edit subscriptions, but if you have a continuing subscription, you don’t do anything in order for the card to be charged when due. I hope that makes sense.
- Subscriptions handles the ‘subscription’, not stripe. As far as Stripe is concerned, they are seperate purchases, not a ‘subscription’.
- Re: billing periods, you’re going to want to run the chron once a day, regardless of the period. You can specify a plan’s interval, so daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.
- You can set it to to only occur once.
- You do need to create a ‘plan’ which is basically a product. So it’s not really the best if you want to do a lot of single, one time, unique charges. There isn’t a ton of plan info, but you do need to create a plan.
If you’re still not sure whether it’s a good fit, hit me at [email protected] and we can chat.
Thank you, I now seem to understand how it works. Yes, my current system uses invoices, reason why you can use what ever payment method you want. It seems subscriptions is not the best for my approach on which I use orders, invoices and custom charges unique per user.
How about the Charge add-on? Would this be a better approach for single one time unique charges?
How hard would it be to add another payment vendor to that module? Example: I want to add PayPal, or a manual one (bank) on which I need to mark the payment as approved manually.
Would that module (charge) allow me to bill with a cron and let users have different cards stored? I would create the order/invoice part manually, so they can pay manually select a specific card. Just use the module to perform the actual transaction (bill, refund, etc.)
All the ones I know for sure, if you have a recurring payment sort of situation, it just automatically charges the card on file for as long as the subscription lasts.
I bounced it around with one of the developers and we’re both thinking you’d need a custom solution to get what you want. Either Charge or Subscriptions would work for most of the payment stuff- just have a 1 time purchase. But you’d need something custom to send invoices and integrate with whatever application you go with. And if you’re wanting paypal, the free, native Simple Commerce might actually be easier to integrate.
It sounds a bit tricky to me overall, though.
You might reach out to Cartthrob and see if they have any suggestions.
And I’d also look around and see if there are any standalone options that might work. It’s not how I’ve generally seen recurring payments done, so I’m not sure you’ll find an ‘out of the box’ EE one. But if you expand your search, you may find some options that are easy to integrate with an EE site. It’s definitely something I’d research.