Questions – customization for our business

Hi there,

I’ve looked through a good deal of your documentation, and also played with your free version, and still the answers to a few of my questions are not found. Can you please tell me about the following?

1. Our business sells a recurring (monthly) service. When a customer first purchases the service, they can customize the service to their business. Basically, there’s a base “package” and they can add things on, in specific quantities, which are also charged monthly. So my question is, does s2Member support this automatically, or is their custom scripting required? The customer must be able to choose both the option they want, and the quantity of that option.

2. Customers often do not know exactly how many of each “option” (from #1 above) they need when signing up, so they chose none, or too few, or in some cases too many.. We often have to adjust this, which then adjusts their recurring billing amount. Can this be done through the existing s2member back end, or would it have to be custom coded?

3. Our customers often grow out of one package and need to move up into a new package. They would typically do this by calling us. Can we, through the WordPress dashboard, automatically upgrade a customer to a new package (membership level, as you call it)?

4. Can the customer also do this upgrade (from #3 above) themselves, through their Membership Options Page?

5. Can the customer view past charges to their account, through the Membership Options Page?

6. Similarly, can we view all charges to a customer’s account through the WordPress dashboard?

7. Lastly, can we manually charge a customer’s account a one-time charge, and will this automatically show in #6 and #7 above?

Note: Anything above referencing “charging a customers account” is intended to be charged via Authorize.net, configured in s2member.

Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for your inquiry.

1. Our business sells a recurring (monthly) service. When a customer first purchases the service, they can customize the service to their business. Basically, there’s a base “package” and they can add things on, in specific quantities, which are also charged monthly. So my question is, does s2Member support this automatically, or is their custom scripting required? The customer must be able to choose both the option they want, and the quantity of that option.

s2Member currently does not support a Shopping Cart style checkout style as you’d need here. However, s2Member does open the door for integrating this functionality with Custom Capabilities. Custom Capabilities are specific packages that Users can purchase you can protect your content with.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Custom Capabilities

2. Customers often do not know exactly how many of each “option” (from #1 above) they need when signing up, so they chose none, or too few, or in some cases too many.. We often have to adjust this, which then adjusts their recurring billing amount. Can this be done through the existing s2member back end, or would it have to be custom coded?

s2Member does allow for a User’s current subscription to be changed via Billing Modification Forms. These forms allow you to assign users Custom Capabilities and Membership Levels as well, and they will overwrite the User’s current Subscription.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Billing Modification Forms (with s2Member® Pro)

3. Our customers often grow out of one package and need to move up into a new package. They would typically do this by calling us. Can we, through the WordPress dashboard, automatically upgrade a customer to a new package (membership level, as you call it)?

Absolutely. You can also Mass Update Users through your Dashboard.

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4. Can the customer also do this upgrade (from #3 above) themselves, through their Membership Options Page?

Yes, as I mentioned s2Member has Billing Modification Forms for this.

5. Can the customer view past charges to their account, through the Membership Options Page?

6. Similarly, can we view all charges to a customer’s account through the WordPress dashboard?

No, unfortunately this is currently not possible. We are working on getting this into a future version of s2Member, but currently you cannot achieve this without custom code. If you really need to achieve this I’d recommend setting up a Payment Notifications handler with s2Member API Notifications.

See: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Notifications -› Payment Notifications
See Also: Knowledge Base » Building An API Notification Handler

Note: Anything above referencing “charging a customers account” is intended to be charged via Authorize.net, configured in s2member.

If you’d like to charge a Member directly through Authorize.Net, you can do this, but be sure to take the Transaction ID that was generated, and replace the current Transaction ID within your WordPress installation to the new one. This will ensure that any Refunds/Reversals/Cancellations will be reflected on your site.

Let us know if you have any further questions/concerns. :-)