How do you guys bill your members?.... Anybody?

We have a dating website and have not figured out the best way to bill our members... Ideally our members would be billed automatically once a month for their membership. If their payment fails, their account will be suspended until they make a payment.

There seems to be a lack of solutions in regards to having members on a auto-bill method.

What method do you guys in the community use for your memberships? I am interested to hear everybody's method.

So far I think the only one for recurring monthly (or other) payments is the module by 'martinboi' - subscription management.

You can set amount, frequency, what level of access it gives etc... 

Unfortunately, martinboi is a bit of an illusionist and keeps doing dissapearing acts on his support (as in non existent). The module needs to be activated for a domain which has cause loads of frustration for many members including myself. 

Once you get it working, it does everything you need though. 

It SHOULD be added as standard to dolphin core modules and has been requested to be many times, but Andrew Boon and the 'powers that be' never give any commitment or response to those requests...

Other than that, Dolphin does not have anything for recurring payments. Unbelievably.

Considering MartinBoi is no where to be found and does not respond to any emails.. that is not an option. How can we charge automatically?

By waiting for Andrew Boon and the "powers that be" to ADD it to dolphins core, OR, wait for some good dev here to make a similar (advanced) module.

I am not at liberty to reveal anything at this time but a solution outside of Martinboi will be forthcoming; and it won't be tied to a licensing server either.

Oh?

Which means i should not bother wasting my time developing a module to do subscriptions then. Which i was going to do. So thanks. I will not bother.

I am not so sure about that Deano; choice is good.  Part of the problem was that Martinboi was the only module on the market that supported recurring payments and look at how he treated his customer; it is the "I am the electric company, what are you going to do?" (usually one does not have a choice in where they buy electricity).

The Market can use more than one module for subscriptions/recurring payments; it allows the customer a choice.  You may have had offered features that other modules won't have.

Yes, CHOICE is always good

well that is good to hear.. this could not come soon enough.. please keep me and everyone posted! 

Happy New Year

 Is it coming soon or is it still a few months to go?

Soon or months away, either way its long overdue!!!

Deano, any info on how your idea for it will be different to the current one from Martinbois?

Soon as in maybe a week, the module is already coded; not by me, but another developer on Boonex.  They are in process of setting it up now to be purchased.

You can set up your own easy enough with paypal. just create new pages and insert code you generate at paypal. pretty simple stuff really . If you havent already check out deanos tools ( free mod ) and deanos block tools $15 and worth every penny.

With the Paypal recurring it is does not integrate directly with Dolphin membership.. so if the payment fails the members membership is will remain until you manually deactivate it....This needs to be automated to be efficient. If you have 2000 members, you cannot suspend, and unsuspend every time a members payment fails.

By the sound of it a mod will surface any day now. I won't be jumping on it anytime soon though. Budget stretched a bit in the last few days. I do know what u mean.  something is broke in my traffic exchange havent had a chance to take a look( need to set up a test site first). Took care of itself for a few years so I cant complain, but i have been doing manually for a couple months. Provided I look every day its not that bad really.

Is there any update about the billing module?

I am using martinboi's membership management pro and overall it is a working solution because it does allow for recurring payments. I only really have one issue with it and that is that it does not show upgraded membership after being redirected to the site, so I added that part to make it work for me. The really suck part is this: when first purchased the module it did not show up for download, and martin responded within an hour and it was downloadable. Now, I can't get a response to a simple question. And to pay 119 dollars for it really sucks when I have to go in and add code to get it to work 100%. 

After spending that money I really can't afford more and more modules so I am really hoping that martinboi gets this module back on track. 

Another thing. I did not have to get a license for the module so not really sure about the whole licensing deal. Cause if it is retrieving any info from my site then we wasted 119 dollars and will have to immediately remove it as we can't have anything like that going in for security reasins. So if somene could clarify that licensing part please.

I am not sure how his licensing works. But most will at least send the domain or site url or ip address it is running on to tie the license to a domain or website. Dolphin itself does this. I will be eventually adding licensing to most of my modules as well. Which will use either the domain or site url.

I have installed Martinboi's system for someone on their site; I am not using it.  Your version may not have the licensing but the current version does.  Without a proper license, one can not set up the payments for the site.  In the current licensed version, there is code that sends your URL to the licensing server to check for the license you have.  There also appears to be some emailing to Martinboi for some purpose; I think checking if you are using the module on your site.

There is going to be a new payment module; one that is both payment+membership or just payment if you don't need the membership part.  I think the developer said the module is ready; not sure if it is going to be placed on the market here, or on an external site.  I can email the developer and get an update.

Licensing is fine, what I worry about is when a vendor's licensing server goes down, and my module stops working which could cause major problems for my site; lost revenue, whatever.  So, what is needed is a way to handle this.  There should be some method by which my module is not constantly depended on your licensing server to be up and running 24/7; things happen, your server may crash and be off-line for days or weeks, or undetermined amount of time.

Licensing does require to report your URL.  If the vendor states up front that the module must be licensed, then you are probably out of the cost of the module.  However, sending out emails without telling the customer the module does such might be a basis for a refund. 

I did not provide site url or ip address. So I guess I need to contact martinboi for clarification. I do have a current version which was purchased within the last month

The way this works is that he adds your site URL to his licensing server.  Once that is done, you are able to set up the payments section of the module.  The module calls to his licensing server; seeing if your URL is in his database.  So he must have done this at the time you purchased the module; one of the biggest complaints was that he would not respond to emails to add your site to his licensing server. 

Wait, perhaps he removed the licensing server part from the code; I did tell him that if he could not answer emails on time and add the sites to his licensing server in a timely manner that he should just remove that part from the module, perhaps he did.

This is an important one for me, and confusing. And if martinboi can not respond to his support thread on something that was supposed to have been fixed long ago, it makes me really hate that we spent the money in it. Then this confusing nature of the licensing (which I am still leary about as I never gave any info to him other than the transaction id for the purchase). I may have to just go ahead and uninstall till I can get with him and get clarification.

Is there already an update about the module? 

Thnx in advance

Hans

If you are referring to the new one, I PMed the developer the other day but yet to hear back.  Complex modules do take time to properly debug and test.