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Case Study: Creating Membership Websites with Drupal Part 1

Posted by Katy | Categories:
Case Study:
Client has a Drupal website with hundreds of articles about a popular sporting event like baseball. They would like to add a membership subscription component to sell access to their new exclusive website content. Since they expect their sales volume to be low to start with, they want to use a low cost payment gateway like PayPal to process the online payments. They have monthly, 3 month and 6 month membership terms.
 
Solution:
In order to set up membership subscriptions, you need to set up Drupal’s shopping cart, Ubercart, to work with recurring payments. Unfortunately, Ubercart does not currently support PayPal payment gateways for recurring payments. PayPal has 2 options for payment gateways. The standard version is called PayPal WPS (Website Payments Standard) and the paid version PayPal WPP (Website Payflow Pro) has a monthly fee. PayPal WPS is currently not supported by Ubercart for recurring payments. And neither is PayPal WPP.
 
The only Payment Gateway that currently works with recurring payments for Ubercart membership subscriptions is Authorize.net. You will also need to set up a Merchant Account to process credit cards.  If you don't already have a merchant account, Authorize.net will set one up for you. If you currently have your own merchant account, you will need to contact Authorize.net to find out if it works with their payment gateway. They do work with Moneris and Elavon and other Canadian merchant accounts.

Authorize.net is working on a solution so that you, as a Canadian,can charge for your products in CAD funds. But for now, you will need to charge in US funds. But the payments will be converted to CAD funds so you can deposit them into your CAD bank account.

Visit http://www.Authorize.net or call 1-888-323-4289 for more information

Contact Authorize.net to find out what Merchant Accounts they work with. GlobalPaymentsInc.com is another option that you can try.

Posted 6-27-2011 by Katy
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Comments

great article thank you

Submitted by Visitor on Mon, 02/15/2016.
great article thank you

Pretty good post! I just

Submitted by Visitor on Fri, 12/16/2011.
Pretty good post! I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I'll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon. I'll use this information for my work.

WPP not working with ubercart?

Submitted by Visitor on Wed, 10/26/2011.
Hello, I am a merchant e-comm membership website owner/project manager. I came across your blog here and thought we could offer some insight into our successes with using WPP installed in ubercart to handle recurring membership fees. Our team has been working with a Membership Website built with Drupal and using Ubercart to handle recurring payments with WPP installed. It was an easy set-up and only becomes confusing with the addition of an affiliate processor where approvals of transactions are required by the merchant. Which also has an easy fix if you want to use paypal. By installing WPP into Ubercart, and running a cron job with triggered conditional actions, paypal's recurring billing continues to bill our customers every month on the exact date of renewal. Paypal keeps a record, and sends a customizable invoice to your members/subscribers for their review after PayPal has billed another payment. Ubercart will also keep a transaction record within Ubercart which can be accessed through the admin panel under "Shopping Cart" ---- Orders this is available to our members through their account profiles. The important part here is to trigger the conditional actions and set them up correctly for role renewals, based on shopping cart conditions. (Our drupal developer could explain the technical side.) SO far so good, we have had all of our roles renew and decline correctly, and the appropriate member permissions granted immediately upon receipt of payment from PayPal. You can set up currency within ubercart for paypal, a products page etc... The WPP will be plugged right in to the ubercart product page. Dpeending on your PayPal account set-up users can either be on site or redirected to PayPal's servers. You still need a merchant account if you don't want your members to have to sign up for a paypal account, even if they use their credit card PayPal expects them to create a PayPal account...unless you have a PayPal merchant account. We are currently preparing to work with beanstream (Compatible with charter banks TD, Scotia) this will also to add more payment options to our members we will keep you posted how well that integrates with Ubercart. Hope this helps. Richard

Thank you for your comments on PayPal WPP

Submitted by Katy on Thu, 10/27/2011.
I'm glad to hear that PayPal's WPP gateway is now working with Ubercart for Recurring Payments. However,  the Paypal WPS gateway is still not working properly for recurring payments with Ubercart.

My client would like to use WPS to avoid paying a monthly fee for processing payments. We need to find Drupal Developers who will work on fixing the payment gateway for PayPal WPS to work properly with Ubercart's recurring payments.

Alternatively, if you are setting up your membership site from scratch, you can also use this simple paid module called Membership Suite. It's available for only $65.00 USD at MoneyScripts.com. It comes with free updates and support for one year.

I have inquired about migrating Ubercart 2.x members/orders to work with Membership Suite and I'm waiting to hear back from the author. I will keep you posted.

Katy :-)

WPP not working with Ubercart!

Submitted by Visitor on Wed, 08/31/2011.
You mean that it is still not working with Ubercart 2.x for Drupal 6 or that it's not working in CAD?

At the time I wrote this blog

Submitted by Katy on Thu, 10/27/2011.
At the time I wrote this blog post, there were problems with PayPal WPP and WPS not working properly with Ubercart 2.4 and UC_recurring alpha6. These modules have both been updated and WPP is reported to be working well. However, the Paypal WPS gateway for recurring payments still has problems and is not being currently maintained.

Also at the time I wrote this blog post, only the Authorize.net payment gateway worked with Ubercart and recurring payments and it did not accept payments in CAD funds.

I hope this helps to clear things up and thank you for posting your comments,

Katy :-)