I'd like to revisit this issue, related to 28416 and 83786.

Paid membership subscriptions is a really common requirement. The ecommerce module's recurring subscriptions feature works well for this. It has all the features required to support the workflow required, including:

  1. Getting the user to sign up for an account
  2. Accepting payment using a good variety of payment methods
  3. Assigning a role once payment is made
  4. Sending out renewal emails
  5. Expiring the subscription

The issue for memberships is that the shopping cart concept *must* be used. The user must add a membership product to the shopping cart and then check out for the workflow listed above to begin. But all they really want to do is provide the required membership details and make payment to kick it off.

For memberships, a special class of subscription product, the shopping cart is an unnecessary and confusing step.

Let me go further. I also see benefits for other product types. Wouldn't it be great to be able to have a Buy Now link for a product that skips the shopping cart and goes directly to the checkout process? For any website selling one product only, this would be a beneficial option. I know there's no control of quantity, but sometimes this is not required, as in the case of membership subscriptions.

I'm not having a go at the subscriptions system or the ecommerce module. I think it's elegant and really well thought out. However, I think it could be improved by adding a feature to skip the shopping cart step of the workflow.

This issue probably shares territory with lm_paypal but it needs to be addressed in the ecommerce module so that, if nothing else, at least other payment methods are support.

I'm very interested to hear other people's views.

Thanks,
caign

Comments

gordon’s picture

gordon commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Actually a lot of this has been done in the v3 release of E-Commerce which we are currently finishing the testing and release.

Please take a look at the release notes http://drupal.org/node/120025 for more information.

mark matuschka’s picture

mark matuschka commented

Thanks Gordon. I did have a look at the list of new features but I must admit I had not tried the beta. You guys have obviously put a lot of work into it. Many thanks.

nirkman’s picture

nirkman commented

I'm having an issue similar to this one. I have installed e-commerce for Drupal 5, but I do not want to use the shopping cart. I will essentially just be selling 'premier' access to my site, so a shopping cart is unnecessary.

I've been digging around in e-commerce, but I haven't found how to do this. Is there any way to turn on "One-Click Shopping" that skips the cart and goes straight to payment? I'm willing to modify the code if you can show me how.

Thanks!

TerrenceLP’s picture

TerrenceLP commented

If one product, like a membership, etc..., I've used 'cart/review/' in the store config section under destination page after 'add to cart' has been clicked.

Running ec4 alpha 5, also can anyone show me an example on how to create a module for e commerce? I'm a module developer but can't seem to find good examples on how to interact with the product api, thank and hope the above helps!