Recurring billing with e-junkie and authorize.net

[yeti1851]

We are using authorize.net as our online gateway and they offer "Automated Recurring Billing". Is there e-junkie functionality that will allow me to setup a payment plan in my cart? (Instead of charging $1,200 up front, we would like to offer a customer the opportunity to pay $100 for 12 months).

[E-junkie_Chef]

Sorry, we don't support ARB

[inmyskin]

Any update to this?

It has been almost 2 years and recurring billing is vital to our site (and many, many others). We only offer one product - a subscription.

Are you now able to interface with Authorize.net ARB?

[E-junkie_Guru]

We have no plans to support any payment processor's recurring billing/payments anytime in the foreseeable future. However, just because we have no way to fulfill such payments, that doesn't mean you can't use PayPal Recurring Payments or Authorize.Net ARB on their own together with a third-party or custom fulfillment system, independently of us, while still using us for your non-recurring product orders and fulfillment.



What would we be expected to do after receiving notification of each recurring payment? Honestly, even trying to answer that question opens up a huge can of worms for us.



We have no system in place to fulfill the most common probable needs, such as administering a membership-based access system (like members-only logins for a private site), or managing subscribers and sending out periodical content (like monthly "issues" of an e-magazine download), nevermind the multitude of other unrelated things a merchant might conceivably want to do with recurring payments.



We would need to figure out and program all of that from scratch, and there simply isn't enough demand/need to justify the time and expense required not to mention the added complexity (which would affect our system's reliability and stability), diverting resources from the other, much more urgent, high-demand and straightforward upgrades we're constantly working on all the time.

[tvileads]

This is pretty sad, as I really like ejunkie, but have two product lines that require subscription or monthly recurring billing, and using Paypal, so it would seem that with so many other companies out there for shopping carts that offer this, that Ejunkie believes there isn't a demand for it and won't proceed forward with allowing this service after so many years.

Might be that you feel there isn't a demand, that when someone searches for a shopping cart using services like Paypal, that they don't find that service offered and move on to the next, because they need this service for their business.



Sad to say... but we have to move to another company to get the services necessary since Ejunkie doesn't believe there is a demand for it...

[successmarketing]

here's my question regarding recurring billing. say the first payment went through ejunkie and was processed by paypal payments pro. once the transaction was approved, is there functionality within paypal (for example) to make the payment the first of a payment plan? or is that really a question for paypal's virtual terminal.



also, what about supporting other payment processors. we use network merchants for our client related charges, and it's a snap to make a one time payment into recurring billing from inside the virtual terminal. for those transactions we are using quickclick, and then once it shows up in our system it's a snap to link it to established payment plans within our recurring billing system.



i guess the question is... with network merchant's api (which they can provide us) is there a way to link our network merchant's vt with your shopping cart? that would solve ours (and probably a lot of other folks) problems.

[E-junkie_Guru]

We have no way to handle recurring payments at all. As far as our system is concerned, every checkout is a one-shot payment. We can't say whether you could turn one of those into a recurring payment at the payment processor's end, so that would be a matter to ask of them, "straight from the horse's mouth".



It's not a matter of supporting payment processor service X, Y or Z. PayPal already has a Recurring Payments solution, which we actually already use for our own subscription plans, and of course we support PayPal for checkout payments, but it's not so simple to add support for Recurring Payments in our existing PayPal-based checkout methods.



The main issue with recurring payments is that buyers expect to get something for their periodic payments, whether it's a file download, or a tangible product, or ongoing membership in a paysite, or what-have-you, and our system simply has no way to handle the subsequent payments. What happens when our system is notified of the next payment, and the next, etc.? We presume the buyer wouldn't want to keep getting the exact, same file download or the exact, same tangible item every single month.



If you can find a way with any of our existing payment processors to turn a one-shot initial checkout payment into an auto-recurring payment plan after the fact, entirely from their end without anything extra required from our end, then more power to you. We are not likely to add support for additional payment processors in the near future, due to the considerable difficulty in doing so, which would divert development resources from projects of greater and broader potential benefit to more of our merchant subscribers.

[successmarketing]

thanks for the reply. i have a paypal account (the pro one) as well and am using it on one of our sites that we're changing from one time payment (using e-junkie) into a 3 month subscription with paypal.



my main question was whether or not you guys were interested in adding other payment processors. i love ejunkie, and it's great for non-recurring payments (i've used you guys for 18 months now, at least). was just hoping it would be possible to link the one payment processor i enjoy using the most with your service.



thanks again for taking time to reply,



michael

[robbie]

Here's an example of a situation where recurring payments would be helpful in e-junkie. Or, perhaps you can suggest an alternative:



We currently use e-junkie to sell downloads and physical CDs. But now we've built a homegrown streaming music service for schools called RRR.fm. Schools usually pay with Purchase Orders, but we are preparing to offer single accounts to teachers, who will pay with a credit card. The accounts are annual memberships.



Our sign-up is broken into two parts: the account information we need (submitted via a nice Formstack survey), followed by payment. We handle account sign-up and cancellation offline. Why not handle recurring payments through e-junkie? There's no recurring tangible item or PDF, just access to a system we built.



Using e-junkie would allow us to maintain one source of reporting, on top of handy things like promo codes.



What's confusing is the rationale for not wanting to get involved with it. On the one hand, you use it to provide monthly access to a paid site, but on the other hand, you say that our customers would be confused by how it would work. "We presume the buyer wouldn't want to keep getting the exact, same file download or the exact, same tangible item every single month." In our case, there's nothing confusing about it: they get access to the system them paid for--just like we e-junkie customers do. The integration on your part would require eliminating the repetitive "Thank you!" emails by providing another option for renewal thank you messaging, but that's an assumed part of the additional dev time.



If, however, it's too much work for too little demand, that at least makes sense.



Thanks,



Robbie

[E-junkie_Guru]

This post explains our overall development strategy, if you're curious:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/4079#post14073



Subscriptions for our own service just use PayPal's own Recurring Payments solution, bone stock and as-is. Our only involvement is providing PayPal's subscription buttons in the "Start/Update Paid Subscription" screen of our Seller Admin. Clicking the Subscribe button for your chosen plan level just sends you to PayPal's site, where you'd log into your PayPal account, choose a funding source, and approve the payment terms we'd encoded into the button you'd clicked.



This sets up an automatically-recurring payment schedule in your own PayPal account, instructing PayPal to just blindly send us the same amount every month with a reference to your E-junkie account ID. Separately from the payment itself, PayPal also sends an IPN to the URL of a very simple script we have which merely receives the IPN, finds an E-junkie account ID in it, and bumps that account's expiration date back by another month.



I'm sure you can appreciate that it's one thing for us to have that very simple, ad-hoc system that relies on PayPal for the actual subscription setup and payment management, where our end just does just one simple thing: changes an expiration date in our purpose-built account system, vs. quite another thing to have a flexible subscription/membership management system that is capable of handling the wide variety of things that a wide variety of merchants might commonly want to do with recurring payments.



Since you can already set up recurring payments using PayPal alone and use their IPN to notify your own system of those payments, and we currently have nothing at all useful featurewise that we could add to that, we'd rather be honest and say we have no way to support recurring payments rather than proposing a halfway solution that's no solution at all. Also, you should really only be using E-junkie's Transaction Log as a record of orders that you have used E-junkie to accept and fulfill; for accurate and complete financial recordkeeping and reporting, you should really be using your account history with PayPal.



That said, here's something you MIGHT be able to get working:



You would need to use PayPal's own recurring payments button code to take the initial order on your site and set up an auto-recurring payment schedule in the buyer's PayPal account.



You would also need to manually configure your PayPal IPN settings according to those given in our eBay integration instructions:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.ebay.htm



When we receive an IPN from PayPal, our system matches the payment recipient's email with your E-junkie account's PayPal Email setting, then it would attempt to match the Item Name given in the IPN with the Item Name of a product in your E-junkie account. Our system should then process the order as usual for that product (e.g., if it has a file download, we'd issue the buyer a link for that file).



Bear in mind this use of our system would be considered an "unsupported hack", so we may not be able to provide any further advice or assistance in setting this up and getting it to work or troubleshooting any problems you may encounter. We're not even sure what I've described above will even work at all, since it's never actually been done before, so at this point we can only say in theory that it might work.



"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is."

-Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

[bubbles]

E-junkieGuruThis post explains our overall development strategy, if you're curious:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/4079#post14073



Subscriptions for our own service just use PayPal's own Recurring Payments solution, bone stock and as-is. Our only involvement is providing PayPal's subscription buttons in the "Start/Update Paid Subscription" screen of our Seller Admin. Clicking the Subscribe button for your chosen plan level just sends you to PayPal's site, where you'd log into your PayPal account, choose a funding source, and approve the payment terms we'd encoded into the button you'd clicked.



This sets up an automatically-recurring payment schedule in your own PayPal account, instructing PayPal to just blindly send us the same amount every month with a reference to your E-junkie account ID. Separately from the payment itself, PayPal also sends an IPN to the URL of a very simple script we have which merely receives the IPN, finds an E-junkie account ID in it, and bumps that account's expiration date back by another month.



I'm sure you can appreciate that it's one thing for us to have that very simple, ad-hoc system that relies on PayPal for the actual subscription setup and payment management, where our end just does just one simple thing: changes an expiration date in our purpose-built account system, vs. quite another thing to have a flexible subscription/membership management system that is capable of handling the wide variety of things that a wide variety of merchants might commonly want to do with recurring payments.



Since you can already set up recurring payments using PayPal alone and use their IPN to notify your own system of those payments, and we currently have nothing at all useful featurewise that we could add to that, we'd rather be honest and say we have no way to support recurring payments rather than proposing a halfway solution that's no solution at all. Also, you should really only be using E-junkie's Transaction Log as a record of orders that you have used E-junkie to accept and fulfill; for accurate and complete financial recordkeeping and reporting, you should really be using your account history with PayPal.



That said, here's something you MIGHT be able to get working:



You would need to use PayPal's own recurring payments button code to take the initial order on your site and set up an auto-recurring payment schedule in the buyer's PayPal account.



You would also need to manually configure your PayPal IPN settings according to those given in our eBay integration instructions:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.ebay.htm



When we receive an IPN from PayPal, our system matches the payment recipient's email with your E-junkie account's PayPal Email setting, then it would attempt to match the Item Name given in the IPN with the Item Name of a product in your E-junkie account. Our system should then process the order as usual for that product (e.g., if it has a file download, we'd issue the buyer a link for that file).



Bear in mind this use of our system would be considered an "unsupported hack", so we may not be able to provide any further advice or assistance in setting this up and getting it to work or troubleshooting any problems you may encounter. We're not even sure what I've described above will even work at all, since it's never actually been done before, so at this point we can only say in theory that it might work.



"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is."

-Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

I am a new member of ejunkie. I plan to sell ebooks through your site. I want to know if I can pay your subscription charges in Indian rupees directly to your Delhi office. Since I am based in India, that will be easier for me. I can also save on currency exchange charges and my bank charges. I'm sure many other sellers from India would also welcome this option.

[E-junkie_Ninja]

I will pass your suggestion on to the appropriate people. At this time, our subscription plans are set up as auto-recurring payment schedule in your PayPal account, instructing PayPal to send us the same amount at the same time every month to keep your account with us active. Or, if you do not have a PayPal account at all or cannot associate a credit card with the PayPal account you do have, then we can send you a link to pay a nonrefundable deposit for a full year of service in advance. You can fund this deposit from your PayPal balance, eCheck or an associated bank account, or if you don't have a PayPal account just use your credit/debit card (which would still be authorized through PayPal's site, even without using a PayPal account). If you want to go with this second option, then please send us an e-mail and we can setup the annual payment.

[wolfclaw]

Any plans on integrating reoccuring monthly payments? I am a new member and I am charging for a monthly service on my site. It would be nice to be able to manage clients from here. If not is there another service you recommend to manage monthly subscribers? I use aweber to manage my email lists.



Thanks!



Shane

[E-junkie_Monster]

It's certainly something on our development team's radar and has been very widely requested, but for the time being it is not something that we can implement yet.



You may want to look into using PayPal's own Recurring Payments solution as-is or combined with a purpose-built membership management system such as FrontDeskApp, CheddarGetter, etc. You can use PayPal Recurring Payments at the same time as using E-junkie with PayPal, and they won't interfere with each other at all.

[jimmyrose]

This is so disappointing. I've spent the last 2 weeks trying to find a cart system that did exactly what I wanted. NO one implements the cart/coupon/payment system as nicely as you guys - it actually looks like part of your own site. Figured I'd finally found exactly what I'd wanted.... and then I read this.



Ah well, the search continues

[dustin]

Any update on this guys?

[E-junkie_Guru]

At present, we still do not have any way of supporting auto-recurring payments such as a periodic subscription or installment plan.