Using S2member for a custom built SaaS

Hi

we run a SaaS where the public facing website (frontpage, pricing, sign up, about us etc) is running on wordpress whereas the webapplication itself if running on Google App Engine on another domain (each account gets a subdomain like myaccount.webappdomain.com). We are wondering whether it might be better for us to use s2member as our customer management framework for defining and handling pricing levels, coupons, affiliates and all the other stuff that s2member can do.
The initial customer signup is right now done on the wordpress site, so I guess using s2member is not a problem for that part. And using the technique described here: http://www.s2member.com/kb/remote-user-status-custom-api/ we could create a webservice so when the user logs in to the app, we could check the payment status and plan.

But right now the user can upgrade or downgrade his / her plan inside the webapp. And we don’t want the user to maintain his/her profile in two places (the website and the webapplication). So is it possible to do the upgrade/downgrade from within the webapp, but hook into the s2member framework, to update the account ? We are using paypal recurring subscriptions to handle payments.

thanks
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

Yes, you should be able to dig into the s2Member code, which is all available for free, and follow how the upgrade/downgrade (aka Billing Modification) is handled by s2Member. Presently, the only remote actions supported by s2Member are new signups through the Remote Operations API (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Remote Operations API). If you need to recreate things like the upgrade process, you’ll need to dig into the code yourself. (It’s not as simple as a hook because an upgrade/downgrade requires changes to the payment, which requires interactions with the payment gateway).

If you want to handle the entire upgrade/downgrade process within the webapp (including interactions with the payment gateway) and simply update the users WordPress account, you can certainly do that. You’d simply change the users’ role and/or Custom Capabilities, along with the new Subscription/Transaction ID if changes, to reflect the upgrade/downgrade.