Request for limited support to PayPal subscriptions

[tony_turtle]

to e-Junkie Staff



I am new to e-Junkie. I am happy with the capabilities of the shopping cart and affiliate management for purchased products. I am disappointed with the lack of support for PayPal subscriptions. Scanning the forum, you have been saying "No" and "Sorry" to many potential customers. I understand the difficulty of fully supporting subscriptions when e-junkie is not in the middle of each transaction. I am writing this to point out the desirability of a limited support for the initial setup when e-junkie IS involved in the transaction.



Here is my situation:

I have been using the PayPal Recurring subscription buttons for about a year now. They do the job but they do not alow me to offer package discounts, pay affiliates, discount codes, etc.. Also my customers have to subscribe to each feature of the membership seperately. It would be nice if they can select the features (in a shopping cart) and do a single subscription. I can then offer incentive discounts to add features. PayPal subscriptions do not allow any of these marketing techniques. There is a definite gap in the marketplace since I have not yet found a solution (at a reasonable price).



I would be very happy if e-Junkie could handle the shopping cart aspects of the initial purchase and simply setup the recurring transaction with PayPal. Affiliate commissions would be paid only on the initial purchace, but customers would benefit continually from whatever discounts or incentives they signed up with.



Please consider a limited form of support for subscription payments. Limited support may not earn you kudos with the reviewers. However, "good enough" at the right price will earn you more loyal customers and stop driving prospects to other venders.



p.s. If there is a workaround I can implement in the HTML code now, I would be very interested in it.



Thank you for a great product.

[E-junkie_Guru]

We appreciate the suggestion, but we have no way to handle orders involving recurring payments at the moment and, indeed, PayPal may not even provide any way of integrating those into an outside e-commerce system such as ours.



As far as we know, all solutions using PayPal Recurring Payments system are just using PayPal's own solutions for those as-is; you might want to hire a custom development shop to investigate the possibilities of using that system.



Even our own subscription plans for the use of our services just use PayPal's solution, but it's one thing for our own, tailor-made and dedicated account-management system to simply passively receive notification of payments so we can keep a seller's account with us active, vs. entirely another matter to build a system from scratch that could be flexible and usable enough to support the myriad of things a merchant might conceivably want to do with recurring payments -- that's frankly just a massive undertaking, and not likely to happen soon with us, if ever.



We can see if there might be any way to use our cart to take the initial order that would start a recurring-payments schedule, but there would be no way for our system to do anything at all for any subsequent auto-recurring payments.

[tony_turtle]

Thanks Tyson for the reply.



I agree that it would be a major undertaking to fully support recurring payments. But that is a job better left to PayPal.



Your last paragraph actually described my request. Handle the initial order in the shopping cart and send paypal a "recurring payment" transaction. Once the order is processed, e-junkie's role is complete. PayPal will manage the recurring billing henceforth. Obviously, the only way to compute affiliate commissions is on the initial order amount.



Your last paragraph left me some hope. I would appreciate it if this idea is discussed internally, and a prompt decision is made, so we can move on.



Best regards,

[redrovercoffee]

I second this idea! I'd love to be able to create a cart item called "subscription" that would somehow trigger a PayPal subscription or form. It'd be so great to keep everything e-junkie initiated.



I am so frustrated by the lack of an easy option to start a PayPal subscription on a specified date!



Thanks for listening to my rant!

[magpiegirl]

I so want this limited subscription support to start a PayPal subscription and handle a one-time affiliate payment!



I simply want to use E-Junkie to provide a 1-time affiliate payment for a PayPal subscription service.



Here's all I need:

1. Ability to associate an E-Junkie product with a PayPal subscription product. I'm okay if I need to specify the purchase price in both systems.

2. When the user clicks the E-Junkie purchase button, it purchases the PayPal subscription and handles the one-time affiliate payment.



I don't need E-Junkie to provide any support for ongoing payments, subscription management, etc.



Please? Pretty Please?

[hardrocker]

As you know, the internet content model is steadily moving to subscriptions. We also need a subscription option for PayPal, and fyi Google Checkout also has the subscription purchase option in beta as of this date.



All we need is for the cart to trigger a subscription purchase, once that is done further collections are done by either PayPal or Google Checkout.



It seems since we can use a PayPal supplied-code 'Subscribe' button and trigger a recurring payment from them, that the e-junkie cart should be somewhat easily able to trigger the same type of transaction.