A few newbie questions. Please clarify

Hi

I am volunteering to build a membership site for a non-profit organization based in Canada. I have been tinkering around wordpress for quite some time and in course of time, has build a couple of sites and is aware of the basics – semi-advanced functions and plugins. This would be, however, my first foray into a membership site. We are looking for annual membership subscription with just one level.

Now my questions are :

Not all of our prospective members presumably does not have nor wish to sign up with paypal just for subscribing and in case what are our options that still lets them sign up WITHOUT a paypal account ?.

I have researched a bit and came to know about Enhanced Recurring Payment from paypal. Does this work in our case and what happens when it’s time to renew subscription in the next year since they do not have an account ?

What type of account would we need with paypal ? We have a non-profit bank account in the name of our organization.

How does the membership sign up process flow goes ?
EX : Member clicks subscribe button >> Goes to Paypal >> Pays >> Redirected to create username, password and profile >> Log in with username and password . Does it work it this way and if not please let me know the flow.

Do I need SSL installed for the domain if I am processing payments at paypal ONLY. We do not plan to integrate third party payment processing at this point of time. Also how cumbersome is the setting up of forms for payment processing on the site if we want to process paypal on our site (Is that even possible ?) ?

How do I manually add members who want to join by mailing us a cheque or handing cash ? Do we got set their membership deadline and stuff like that

How does aweber integration works ? We already use aweber to capture leads from our “coming soon” page on the site. If a member unsubscribes from the newsletter, will that do any change to the membership status and what about the other way ?, ie, if a member cancels the subscription or doesnot renew, do they get automativally unsubscribed from aweber or do we need to do them manually ?

If I want to install buddypress in the future, would it work seamlessly with this plugin, I mean, will only the members be able to access buddypress and register

What about Google’s First Click Free ? Is the plugin able to configure that. You can read about it at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 or at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html . This basically allows people to come and see the first page for free when they come through search

I understand that you can conceal a PART of the page with conditional shortcodes. Can I put a flash file or a video inside the short code or are there any restrictions as to what content can go inside ?

Thank you for your patience and please let me know on these

Jimmy

Hi there,

Thanks for the great questions. I’m listing out the answers below.

Not all of our prospective members presumably does not have nor wish to sign up with paypal just for subscribing and in case what are our options that still lets them sign up WITHOUT a paypal account ?.

If you’re using s2Member Pro (with PayPal Pro), you can set up your Pro Forms to accept credit cards directly, and not require a PayPal account. If you’re looking to set this up without PayPal Pro, you can upgrade to PayPal Express Checkout with PayPal Standard (which are both free), and change the accept_via_paypal=”” attribute (See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Shortcode Attributes (Explained) once you have s2Member Pro Installed) of the Pro Form accordingly. Note that this will not work with recurring payment setups.

The s2Member Framework (free version) will usually allow users to pay with a credit card, without a PayPal account through PayPal with buttons when your button is not using recurring billing. This also requires PayPal Express Checkout and sometimes you need to contact PayPal to get this working correctly.

I have researched a bit and came to know about Enhanced Recurring Payment from paypal. Does this work in our case and what happens when it’s time to renew subscription in the next year since they do not have an account ?

We normally don’t recommend ERP because it results in problems for the site owner that they simply do not (or refuse not to) foresee. One of the main issues with ERP, is that there’s no way for a customer to cancel future charges, and there’s no way for s2Member to cancel future charges.

What type of account would we need with paypal ? We have a non-profit bank account in the name of our organization.

Your PayPal account should be a PayPal Business Account capable of setting up PayPal IPN and PDT settings. If you can set that up, your account should be just fine for regular PayPal payments with PayPal buttons, or with Pro Forms, assuming that you have/will enabled/enable Express Checkout.

How does the membership sign up process flow goes ?
EX : Member clicks subscribe button >> Goes to Paypal >> Pays >> Redirected to create username, password and profile >> Log in with username and password . Does it work it this way and if not please let me know the flow.

This is almost what happens. Instead of being directly redirect to create username and password, the user is sent an email with a link to register. Users are sent to your thank-you/success page, which is just a plain page that says Thank-you and check your email with standard setup, but you can change where the customer is sent after going to PayPal by adding the success=”” attribute to your shortcode.

Do I need SSL installed for the domain if I am processing payments at paypal ONLY. We do not plan to integrate third party payment processing at this point of time. Also how cumbersome is the setting up of forms for payment processing on the site if we want to process paypal on our site (Is that even possible ?) ?

If you’re not processing through PayPal Pro, there’s no need for an SSL certificate. This certificate is really only needed for PayPal Pro, and other processors such as Authorize.net and Clickbank.

How do I manually add members who want to join by mailing us a cheque or handing cash ? Do we got set their membership deadline and stuff like that

You’ll want to send them a link from Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Registration Access Links. You can only accept one-time payment this way, so all recurring billing that you’d like to do with a check will need to be done manually, by extending the EOT date in the user’s profile.

How does aweber integration works ? We already use aweber to capture leads from our “coming soon” page on the site. If a member unsubscribes from the newsletter, will that do any change to the membership status and what about the other way ?, ie, if a member cancels the subscription or doesnot renew, do they get automativally unsubscribed from aweber or do we need to do them manually ?

If you set up Aweber integration, s2Member will automatically add/remove users from your Aweber list based on things that happen WITHIN s2Member only. s2Member doesn’t get notified when a user unsubscribes from a newsletter, and doesn’t cancel anybody’s membership based on what Aweber would do. Essentially this is a one-way integration.

If I want to install buddypress in the future, would it work seamlessly with this plugin, I mean, will only the members be able to access buddypress and register

s2Member works fine for most users with BuddyPress. If you do set up BuddyPress, it will take over the registration page, and s2Member’s custom fields will still be brought over. You’ll want to set up Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Restriction Options -› URI Access Restrictions to restrict BuddyPress pages.

What about Google’s First Click Free ? Is the plugin able to configure that. You can read about it at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 or at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2008/10/first-click-free-for-web-search.html . This basically allows people to come and see the first page for free when they come through search

This isn’t something that s2Member supports currently. I’ll send a message to Jason (the lead developer) and see if he knows anything about this.

I understand that you can conceal a PART of the page with conditional shortcodes. Can I put a flash file or a video inside the short code or are there any restrictions as to what content can go inside ?

Put anything you’d like within Shortcodes. Just FYI: s2Member does support restriction of videos Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Download Options -› Basic Download Restrictions. You’d probably be interested in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› Download Options -› JW Player® & RTMP Protocol Examples.

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Let us know if I missed anything and/or if you have any other questions.

Hi Bruce

Thank you for taking time to respond with a detailed reply. The whole point of us using this plugin is to facilitate an annual (hopefully) renewing membership. In two parts of your reply, you have mentioned:

Note that this will not work with recurring payment setups

will usually allow users to pay with a credit card, without a PayPal account through PayPal with buttons when your button is not using recurring billing.

Does this mean that s2member is more of a one-time purchase friendly. Did I get it wrong or are there any workarounds for making it work with recurring billing. Again, the whole point of us paying for this plugin is to enable our members to pay as well as renew their annual subscription when the time comes to do so.

Also, if I want to use pro forms, do I need SSL ?

I will be testing the core plugin on a local installation and hope to get a better grasp of things. Please let me know on the above

Jimmy

Hi Jimmy,

s2Member’s processes are set up to deal with both recurring and one-time payments. The restrictions with recurring billing and credit cards come from PayPal. With PayPal Pro, you can do pretty much anything you’d need to, and keep in all on your site, but that’s usually a bit too much of an investment for site owners.

Also, if I want to use pro forms, do I need SSL ?

You need an SSL certificate to accept credit cards directly from your site. This means that any time you have a Pro Form with credit card fields in it, you need an SSL certificate. This only applies when you have PayPal Pro with PayPal’s Pro Forms.

Hi Bruce

I am getting a little bit confused. If the person has a paypal account, then does it make things easy to pay for subscription. Also, I do not plan to process cards ON the site. My main question is: Is S2Member suitable for recurring annual subscriptions and if yes, what is the ideal situation. Do you recommend any other cart provider that works well for subscriptions. Thank you

Jimmy, s2Member is fine for subscriptions too. With PayPal Standard or Express Checkout, when you sell a subscription, the user will be required to login to his PayPal account to pay and start the subscription. PayPal Pro with DPRP allows the user to pay without his card without having to login to PayPal, that’s why he mentioned it.