Subscription based eCommerce Site selling Physical Goods [closed]

Question

I want to implement a system where customers can buy physical products as subscription with recurring billing. Customers will come to my site, visit product page and buy stuff. They need to register an account before purchasing. After registration they will be forwarded to payment processor for payment and after successful payment they will be returned back to my site.

Requirement:

1. I dont want to use Paypal as a payment processor.

2. It will be recurring payment on monthly, quarterly, bi-annual or annual basis.

3. Customers can login to my site in order to view their Order History, Profile Management and can edit their Billing and/or Shipping details.

4. Customers can cancel their Subscription any time after login to their account on my site.

Plan:

1. Currently I am using wordpress with WooCommerce plugin for eCommerce functionality.

2. I am planning to use Amazon as a payment processor.

3. I have searched WooCommerce Extension Drectory and found WC Subscription extension that can be used for my site. But I just confirmed from the Support WC Subscription only support recurring payment with Paypal and Stripe, no other payment processor is supported at the moment.

Questions:

According to my need, what will be the best solution? I am open to switch the platform from Wordpress to something else that can fulfill my requirement.

Answer 1

checkout getshopped.org plugin, which should provide payment integration with other processors like auth.net.

Magento also provides this kind of functionality with plugin: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/subscriptions-and-recurring-payments.html. But think you should see if it can be done with wordpress before considering moving.. because moving always takes more energy.

Answer 2

For the subscription aspect, WordPress itself is all you need.

The update_user_meta and get_user_meta functions are what you want, without having to fool around with any database connections or SQL. All it takes is one include statement in your theme, and a bit of PHP magic to call the meta functions.

Check out my code, which accomplished what you are trying to do, on Github. It should serve as a good example. I also have a description with embedded code on my blog: Using WordPress As A Pay-For-Access System.

Alternatively, you can check out how I added code to my footer to show text based on custom fields (in this case, hours remaining in a free trial). Looking at what you tried to do, you might add similar code to your theme's header.php instead.

<?php
$current_user = wp_get_current_user();
$subscription = get_user_meta($current_user->ID, 'subscription', true);
if($subscription != "true")
        {
$time = (80000 - (intval(time()) - intval($_COOKIE['seshCurrent'])))/3600;
if(intval($time) < 0)
{
    $time = 22.3;
}
echo("$time hours remaining in this session");
}
?>

For the payment processor, I'd say go with 2Checkout. Low fees, and auto scam checks are a plus, and they accept Credit Cards and Paypal.

You set up your cart with them, or use the REST-like API to generate payment links on the fly; I use this in my own pay-for-access subscription WordPress site, and it works beautifully.

To be completely biased and subjective: I love these guys. In all the months I've been using them, I've never had an issue. They get my money to me promptly, and I kid you not, have the best customer service I've ever experienced. Of course, this is also in comparison to the absolutely terrible experience I had with PayPal (Wow I Hate PayPal!), and lost quite a bit of money with them.

There is one downside to 2CO that I have to be frank about: their fees are a bit higher than most of the competition. Having said that, they have worked on that recently, and its getting (a bit) better. The other downside is the lengthy application process, but this again is for your own security.

All in all, every processor has their ups and downs, this is just my two cents.