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Registration form requirements

Home Forums Community Forum Registration form requirements

This topic contains 6 replies, has 3 voices. Last updated by  Cristián Lávaque 4 years, 3 months ago.

Topic Author Topic
Posted: Monday Sep 17th, 2012 at 3:15 pm #25605
Fred Riley
Username: fredriley

Hi

This query relates to what’s needed to implement a registration form with Paypal. This is vague I know, but I’m new to s2member.

I’ve recently got my organisation to purchase s2member Pro, and I’ve installed it ok on our WordPress installation (currently under development) after having played with the free version. I’ve also set up buyer and seller accounts in the Paypal sandbox. Our organisation currently uses PayPal Website Payments Standard, not Pro.

A current major headache for our membership secretary is that subscribers to our existing non-WP site will click on a PayPal button on the Join page, pay their sub, then the secretary will just receive a bare email that someone has paid, but she often doesn’t know who so has to chase that up by emailing the subscriber. So we would like the subscriber to fill out a form before or after s/he pays so that we know who s/he is. We would also like to add some custom fields to the registration form (eg institution, occupation).

My general question is: what’s the best way to go about this?

More specifically:

  1. can we stick with PP Standard, or do we need to go to Pro Forms? I’m sure we could afford Pro but I don’t want to land us with recurring fees if there’ll be no advantage to them.
  2. if we use Pro Forms, will the registration form details go into the WordPress database (minus credit card info, of course)?
  3. can I arrange for our secretary to receive an email after the subscriber has paid and subscribed to the site, with a unique subscriber ID?
  4. what does an email from PayPal, with registration details, look like? The Sandbox doesn’t send out any real emails for me to check

Sorry, I’m still not being very clear. I’ve got our requirements but am still not sure as to how to implement them. I’ve had a look some forum threads under the tag ‘registration’ which were useful, and have watched the first four videos on s2member. I’ve not implemented a membership site before and if I mess it up it could be costly, so I want to get it sorted out using the Sandbox before we go live in a month or so.

I’m happy to be pointed to relevant pages in The Fine Manual, and/or to relevant videos.

Cheers

Fred Riley
Web Administrator, EUROCALL

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Posted: Tuesday Sep 18th, 2012 at 2:32 am #25674
Raam Dev
Username: Raam
Staff Member

Hi Fred,

Please see my replies below and let us know if you have any other questions:

can we stick with PP Standard, or do we need to go to Pro Forms? I’m sure we could afford Pro but I don’t want to land us with recurring fees if there’ll be no advantage to them.

You can use the s2Member Pro-Forms without having PayPal Pro. See the following from Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Quick Start Guide:

*PayPal® Pro is NOT Absolutely Required* s2Member is very flexible. It is now possible to integrate Pro Forms without a PayPal® Pro account, whereby the enhanced Form Shortcodes that s2Member provides can be integrated ONLY with PayPal® Express Checkout. In other words, if you get declined for PayPal® Pro service, you can still use s2Member Pro Forms. Ask PayPal® to activate Express Checkout for you. ( it’s free ). Once Express Checkout is enabled, you will have access to your PayPal® API Credentials. Log into your PayPal® account, and navigate to Profile -> API Access (or Request API Credentials). You’ll choose ( Request API Signature ). Now … here is the tricky part; whenever you generate a Pro Form Shortcode with s2Member, be sure to change accept=”paypal,visa,mastercard,amex,discover,maestro,solo” to just accept=”paypal”; thereby excluding the on-site credit card processing functionality; which is available only with PayPal® Pro.

The s2Member Pro-Forms are definitely what you want to use for your scenario. The Pro-Forms will present your new member with a form to fill out. Once all the fields are filled out (including any Custom Registration Fields that you may have created in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields), the user will be able to choose their payment method.

Since you don’t have PayPal Pro, the only payment option will be Paypal. When the user clicks the checkout button, their s2Member account (i.e., their WordPress account) will be created and then they will be transferred to PayPal’s website to complete their payment.

Once payment is complete, PayPal will notify s2Member that the user has paid and s2Member will set their account to the appropriate level (if they don’t complete payment after being transferred to PayPal, their s2Member account will remain at Level 0, e.g., at the Free Subscriber level).

if we use Pro Forms, will the registration form details go into the WordPress database (minus credit card info, of course)?

Yes, all the details filled out during registration are stored in the WordPress database. There are no payment details stored on the WordPress side (except for the Payment Gateway used and the Transaction/Subscription ID).

can I arrange for our secretary to receive an email after the subscriber has paid and subscribed to the site, with a unique subscriber ID?

Yes, you can configure an email address to receive Payment Notifications in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Notifications -› Payment Notifications.

what does an email from PayPal, with registration details, look like? The Sandbox doesn’t send out any real emails for me to check

The emails from PayPal do not contain any information about Custom Registration Fields. However, s2Member does send emails about signups and you can configure those within s2Member. For example, if you wanted to configure to the New User Notification email and customize it to include the Custom Registration Fields, you’d modify it here: Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Email Configuration.

Posted: Tuesday Sep 18th, 2012 at 12:27 pm #25704
Fred Riley
Username: fredriley

Thank you, Raam, that’s very helpful indeed. It is very useful for me to have the steps I need to take spelled out in detail. I did see that text that you quoted when I was getting acquainted with s2member, but there’s so much to take in that it must have migrated to many of the ‘bad sectors’ that currently infest my ageing memory :(

Cheers

Fred

Posted: Wednesday Sep 19th, 2012 at 1:33 pm #25825
Fred Riley
Username: fredriley

Hi again Raam

I’ve tried to create a Pro Form based on your reply above, and am running into some snags. I’ve a few more Qs, I’m afraid:

1. Does PayPal Express Checkout need to be enabled? I’ve had a look on the PP site where there’s a section on Express Checkout (getting started, integration guide) which has no instructions to enable checkout, and implies that it’s a default feature of a business account. I’ve got PP API credentials from a sandbox buyer account as a standard (non-Pro) business account.

2. I created a Pro form for level 1 access, specifying a €90 initial and recurring annual sub, and got shortcode which I copied to a page and edited the “accept” field as suggested, to get:

[s2Member-Pro-PayPal-Form level="1" ccaps="" desc="1 Year @ $90 / then $90 EUR / Yearly ( recurring charge, for ongoing access )" ps="paypal" lc="" cc="EUR" dg="0" ns="1" custom="www.eurocall-languages.org" ta="90" tp="1" tt="Y" ra="90" rp="1" rt="Y" rr="1" rrt="" rra="2" accept="paypal" accept_via_paypal="paypal" coupon="" accept_coupons="0" default_country_code="" captcha="0" /]

When displayed, this gave the error:

Invalid form configuration. Invalid “ta, tp, tt” attributes. Trial Period. When provided, these cannot be exactly the same as your “ra, rp, rt” attributes.

Do I need to manually edit the shortcode, or is there something else I need to tweak? I’ve not specified any trial periods anywhere.

3. Can I make Euros the default currency, or does it have to be USD for Paypal purposes?

4. I added a custom registration form field in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields but this doesn’t appear in the Pro form. Is that because of the error above?

5. Is there one of Jason’s helpful videos on the form generation process?

I’m sure I’ll get the hang of this eventually….

Fred

Posted: Thursday Sep 20th, 2012 at 7:12 am #25907
Raam Dev
Username: Raam
Staff Member

Hi Fred,

Please see my replies below:

1. Does PayPal Express Checkout need to be enabled? I’ve had a look on the PP site where there’s a section on Express Checkout (getting started, integration guide) which has no instructions to enable checkout, and implies that it’s a default feature of a business account. I’ve got PP API credentials from a sandbox buyer account as a standard (non-Pro) business account.

I believe it’s already enabled as part of your PayPal Business account. I don’t remember needing to manually enable it. If you want to double-check, I recommend contacting PayPal.

2. I created a Pro form for level 1 access, specifying a €90 initial and recurring annual sub, and got shortcode which I copied to a page and edited the “accept” field as suggested, to get:

This is a limitation on PayPal’s side. PayPal doesn’t let you have a trial amount and a recurring amount that are exactly the same. Two possible solutions are to set the same term in using different words, e.g. 1Y -> 12M or to simply change the initial/trial amount by 1 cent (€89.99).

3. Can I make Euros the default currency, or does it have to be USD for Paypal purposes?

I believe setting the currency to EUR in the Pro-Form should be enough to make it the default, but it may also depend on what your default currency is on PayPal.

4. I added a custom registration form field in Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Registration/Profile Fields but this doesn’t appear in the Pro form. Is that because of the error above?

When you created the Custom Registation Field, did you set “Applicable Membership Levels” to all? If you specified a specific level, make sure that you’re using a Pro-Form that matches the level you specified, otherwise it won’t show up.

5. Is there one of Jason’s helpful videos on the form generation process?

There isn’t a video for Pro-Form generation. There’s really nothing more to generating the Pro-Forms than pressing the “Generate Form” button after entering in the prices/description.

Posted: Friday Sep 21st, 2012 at 4:30 pm #26080
Fred Riley
Username: fredriley

Thanks again, Raam. For the custom fields, I did set them to apply to all levels, but my error was to test the page with the shortcode whilst logged in as administrator. When I looked at the page in another browser where I wasn’t logged in, the custom fields displayed fine.

On the trial period thing, I think we’ll likely default to our current situation, which is that a subscriber pays a one-off annual fee and is prompted to renew before it expires, which currently our secretary does manually. Which brings me to a supplementary issue, that of reminding the member that their membership is due to expire and prompting her/him to renew. This is an important issue for our organisation. We don’t want to lock members into a recurring sub for various reasons, not least that it might put a good few people off joining, but we do want to encourage them to renew.

Looking at the thread “EOT event triggering” on the support forum, it appears that current s2member behaviour on a subscription expiring (EOT) is to just demote the member without notice, and that there’s no current facility for the member to receive an email a month, say, beforehand and encourage her to renew unless we write custom code for EOT hooks. Is that the case? I’m asking because I know that my colleagues will ask me the question, so I want to be prepared.

As an aside, I had a look at the PayPal API documentation on the developer site, and it’s pretty damned complex. I can really begin to appreciate the amount of work that’s gone into integrating s2member with PP – it’s not something I’d fancy doing myself even as an experienced coder. So, kudos to the s2member techs :)

Cheers

Fred

Posted: Saturday Sep 22nd, 2012 at 7:31 am #26107

Which brings me to a supplementary issue, that of reminding the member that their membership is due to expire and prompting her/him to renew.

Yes, this is something we’re working on and will be coming in the new s2Member being developed. We don’t have a date for it yet, but it’s in the works.

In the meantime, you may be able to use AWeber or MailChimp to send the user an email on set dates right before the terms expire. It’s not the best solution, but it may be good enough for now. Video » s2Member (API List Servers)

unless we write custom code for EOT hooks. Is that the case?

The problem here is that with subscriptions, EOT time is not set before the subscription is ended (e.g. payment fails).

If the user has to pay each month manually, though, with single payments (e.g. “buy now” transactions in PayPal, i.e. not a subscription), then EOT time is set right there, and that’d let you have a cron-job with a script to check the EOT times for all users and email those that are close to the date.

I hope that helps!

As an aside, I had a look at the PayPal API documentation on the developer site, and it’s pretty damned complex. I can really begin to appreciate the amount of work that’s gone into integrating s2member with PP – it’s not something I’d fancy doing myself even as an experienced coder. So, kudos to the s2member techs :)

Thanks for the kudos! :)

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