Paypal Pro question

Hi,

Apologies for my very simple couple of questions.

I have a site which used to be 100% payment by mail for a published magazine. I want to get these people onboard with S2member and it is working fine. I have set it up so new members can buy either a digital or a physical subscription on a recurring paypal basis.

I have added the people who have paid by mail to a level on s2member (where I know their email address). What I would like to do is enable them to renew online. I guess I will have to get them to let me know when they want to renew, knock them down to free member and let them upgrade to level 1? A bit messy but manageable. Are there any better ways?

My second question is looking at the PayPal Pro forms it seems I can allow payment via credit card via paypal (don’t use “accept” but use “accept_via_paypal”). I presume this does not keep any CC info on-site but just passes it to paypal? I don’t have a PP Pro account, just a premier account. Will this method still work?

Like I said, hopefully very simple questions there, but it would put my mind at rest if you could just clear it up for me. Thanks for a great product!

J

Hi John,

Please see my replies below:

I have added the people who have paid by mail to a level on s2member (where I know their email address). What I would like to do is enable them to renew online. I guess I will have to get them to let me know when they want to renew, knock them down to free member and let them upgrade to level 1? A bit messy but manageable. Are there any better ways?

Unfortunately, that would be the best way of accomplishing that. What you’d do is create a page that contains an upgrade form (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Billing Modification Forms) that upgrades the user from a free account back to one of the levels.

If you want the downgrade to a free account to happen automatically, could manually set their Automatic EOT Time (see the Automatic EOT Time field when editing their account) to the date their account should expire. Then, make sure that your Automatic EOT Behavior (Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Options -› Automatic EOT Behavior) is set to “Demote” and not “Delete”. When their account expires on the date you specified in the Automatic EOT Time field, they will automatically
be demoted to a Free subscriber.

My second question is looking at the PayPal Pro forms it seems I can allow payment via credit card via paypal (don’t use “accept” but use “accept_via_paypal”). I presume this does not keep any CC info on-site but just passes it to paypal? I don’t have a PP Pro account, just a premier account. Will this method still work?

If you want to accept credit cards on-site and have them processed through PayPal, you’ll need to have a PayPal Pro account. The alternative to accepting credit cards without requiring your customer to have a PayPal account would be to enable that feature on PayPal’s side. The customer would check out with PayPal, click the button that says “I don’t have a PayPal account”, and would then fill out their credit card details on PayPal’s site.

Thanks

If you want to accept credit cards on-site and have them processed through PayPal, you’ll need to have a PayPal Pro account. The alternative to accepting credit cards without requiring your customer to have a PayPal account would be to enable that feature on PayPal’s side. The customer would check out with PayPal, click the button that says “I don’t have a PayPal account”, and would then fill out their credit card details on PayPal’s site.

Just to clarify, I don’t care about keeping people on-site, I am happy for them to go off to Paypal. The way I understood it was people could pay by card if they didn’t have a PP account anyway, is this not the case? Does the box not appear for “I don’t have a paypal account” if you just select paypal as a payment method?

I guess what I want to know is do I need to explicitly specify the “accept_via_paypal” card options in order for people to be able to go off to paypal and use their card? Is this what you mean by “enable that feature on PayPal’s side”?

Thanks

Hi John.

If you’re using the PayPal Standard buttons, then PayPal will give the option to pay without a PayPal account if it’s a buy-now transaction. If it’s a subscription, then he will have to have a PayPal account.

If you’re using the PayPal pro-form without PayPal Pro, then you’d be using Express Checkout, which will always require the person to have a PayPal account.

I hope that helps.