PayPal Pro Subscriptions w/o Recurring Addon?

Hello,

I have been using the S2Member plugin on a client site to manage user access to digital content via subscriptions and recurring payments – great job guys, love your plugin!

We have just purchased the Pro version in order to allow our subscribers to sign up WITHOUT having to create a PayPal profile, but ended up getting the “Error #11586. DPRP is disabled. ” error. Researching seems to point out we need to purchase the Direct Payment service ($30/month) from PayPal to get it working, on top of our existing Payments Pro ($30/month) service we already have.

Now, before we go ahead and do that, I just wanted to last time confirm that it is indeed the only solution; is there no way for s2Member to manage the recurring subscriptions itself and use PayPal Direct Payment each month to handle the payments, instead of relying on PayPal managing them thus requiring the additional $30/month service? Please advise.

Sincerely,
Jakub

Now, before we go ahead and do that, I just wanted to last time confirm that it is indeed the only solution; is there no way for s2Member to manage the recurring subscriptions itself and use PayPal Direct Payment each month to handle the payments, instead of relying on PayPal managing them thus requiring the additional $30/month service? Please advise.

Unfortunately this is the only way to *automatically* charge users on a recurring basis. Users have to input their PayPal info and sign up for your service again if you do not have DPRP enabled. If you’d rather not pay for the PayPal service, you could set up s2Member to work using one-time payments for a specific amount of time, and then have users pay for more time to be added to their accounts once they are demoted.

This might result in less repeat business however, and in my personal opinion it is worth it to pay the extra money to PayPal to automatically charge users for access.

Thank you for your prompt reply and, indeed, I do not want my users to have to manually keep paying each month. I was hoping there was an option for s2Member to manage the recurring profiles itself (rather than PayPal doing it) and automatically charge the users on a monthly basis (via a CRON job) – I do understand this would most likely require storing user credit card information on our end, which I am guessing was the reason s2Member did not go down that path? Although I know some gateways (such as Authorize.Net) do provide a service for storing “customer profiles” on their end exactly for this kind of recurring payment system without requiring the website to store the credit cards themselves.

In any case, thank you for the help and I will talk to my client about the extra fee. I could code up a system I described above myself, but frankly, your plugin is much nicer and convenient, so I would rather stick to that :)

– Jakub

Hi Jakub,

I do understand this would most likely require storing user credit card information on our end, which I am guessing was the reason s2Member did not go down that path?

Yes, s2Member would be forced to save info other than the Paid Subsription ID, which could lead to this data being compromised if there was ever a way found to access this data outside of s2Member’s processes.