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Pro/Premium Accounts - Where to begin
#1

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
I run a free consumer website and I'm considering adding Pro accounts for business features. This is a fairly complicated task though and I'm wondering if anyone has any good resources for where to begin. If you happen to be sitting on a pro account "module" written for CI (or just in php), I'd love to talk. I'm not holding my breath for that one though, so if another has any other resources I would appreciate the help. For example:

- Sample Database schema that includes accounts, users, billing, packages/levels, discounts, referrals, and everything I'm forgetting.

- Vendor recommendations
- CC processing without having to store CC nums locally

- Any Code samples
- Recurring Billing libraries
- Management Interfaces

- Best Practices
- Handling Refunds
- Handling Charge backs
- Blog Posts

- Best places to get help
- Forums
- Mailing Lists

There's obviously a lot I'm leaving out, both because I don't want this to be extremely long, and I may not know about it yet! Anything you can do to point me in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks!
#2

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
No one has any comments? I thought I'd get at least one person screaming "Just don't use paypal". Apparently it's not a very engaging question Smile
#3

[eluser]Eric Cope[/eluser]
Sounds like you have a lot of work ahead of you. Keep us posted to your results.
#4

[eluser]crumpet[/eluser]
It seems that you are adding this on to an existing website so i think you want to try and do this without affecting current tables. Thus i would recommend a joining table of users2subscriptions which has fields (user_id, subscription_id) then you have a table called subscriptions (subscription_id, title, description, price) and then some kind of system to authenticate access based on your subscriptions. Depending how complex it is i might just use the subscription_id so you can do like if($user->subscription_id >= 2){ echo 'subscribing user feature' }. If your website is more complex you might need more fields to deal with the auth stuff. The final table I would do is for hte payments. I would have subscription_payments with fields (payment_id, user_id, subscription_id, amount, date_paid, valid_for). Then maybe make a chron job or something to check every day if date_paid + valid_for > time() and if so remove the users privileges.

I have not actually used this... just trying to suggest something
let us know how it goes
#5

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
I appreciate both of your replies.

For anyone who is interested in this topic, check out a RoR demo video at: http://railskits.com/wp-content/images/saas_tour.mov

It's very cool software. Not free, but for $249 it would easily pay for itself in the time savings. A package like this would be idea, but I haven't found anything decent for php, so it's definitely roll-your-own time.

I looking at Braintree Payment Solutions versus Authorize.net for the gateway. If anyone has experience with either of these and would like to share, please post. Also, any recommendations of merchant accounts would also be appreciated.
#6

[eluser]Phil Norton[/eluser]
Have you looked at http://www.foxycart.com ? It can handle subscriptions/memberships etc. Not too expensive either...
#7

[eluser]Milos Dakic[/eluser]
I'd very much go custom here. I work for a company that sells peripheral devices, and they looked at all the paid and open source solution. They are all nice and do a specific job, but down the track you will realise that its not doing what you need any more, and therefore will need to either change things in the package (which will be a headache as you need to remember changes you made when new releases come around) or have to think about building something specific to your needs.

I'd say start it off slowly. The system we run on at work is very large, but functionality is always being added, so make sure you have time to do all this or have someone dedicated to make it for you.

Let us know how you go.
#8

[eluser]quaker120[/eluser]
I use Braintree. They're great & we're the only vendor I could find w/ reasonable rates who could handle all my requirements--recurring payments, international currencies, and all the PCI-DSS headaches. Their rates are pretty good, too.



[quote author="dmorin" date="1231459403"]I appreciate both of your replies.

For anyone who is interested in this topic, check out a RoR demo video at: http://railskits.com/wp-content/images/saas_tour.mov

It's very cool software. Not free, but for $249 it would easily pay for itself in the time savings. A package like this would be idea, but I haven't found anything decent for php, so it's definitely roll-your-own time.

I looking at Braintree Payment Solutions versus Authorize.net for the gateway. If anyone has experience with either of these and would like to share, please post. Also, any recommendations of merchant accounts would also be appreciated.[/quote]
#9

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
I looked at Braintree and they seemed really good, except they wanted something like $200-250/month minimum which was just too high for me starting out. We would have to be processing a few grand per month to get to that minimum through processing fees.




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