First, I'd like to thank you for a really great module!!

I'm hoping you can give me some advice.
I have a non-profit site. Our community supports the non-profit by purchasing one-year memberships. We have different membership levels. To accept membership payments online, I installed your lm_paypal_subscriptions module, with "recurring payments" turned off. Everything is working fine, however it doesn't quite meet our needs. Specifically:

1) the user is required to sign up for a paypal account. Because we are not taking advantage of recurring payments, we would like not to require the user to have a paypal account.
2) the email message sent by paypal says

"You have successfully signed up for a subscription to xxx using PayPal. Your first subscription payment, for $xxx USD, has already been sent to xxx."

Again, because we are not using recurring payments, this is a one-time payment and it may confuse and mislead the customer if the paypal letter refers to this as a "first subscription payment".

Perhaps it would be better for us to use the lm_paypal_donations module rather than lm_paypal_subscriptions, so that the "regular" paypal mechanism is used rather than the "subscriptions" mechanism. However, we love the fact that the subscriptions module automatically sends renewal notices shortly before the one-year membership expires, and also automatically sends expiration messages.

So I'm wondering: Is there some way to create a hybrid between lm_paypal_donations and lm_paypal_subscriptions that would:
1. allow the user to select one of several one-year membership levels.
2. the user is not required to create a paypal account.
3. the message from paypal indicates this is a one-time payment, not the first subscription payment.
4. the system automatically sends renewal reminder messages and expiration messages.

If you could give me some advice on how I might do this (and also indicate whether it would be tricky or straightforward), I'd very much appreciate that.

Thank you!
Mindy

Comments

grantkruger’s picture

grantkruger
Location Portland
commented

I have a client with similar needs. I wonder if you ever found a good solution to this? If you did could you please post it here.

The requirement to join PayPal comes from PayPal itself and makes little sense when not having renewable subscriptions. I tried simply getting a button generated by PayPal and realised that they force the membership themselves. Which seems to mean that the only way not to force clients to join PayPal is not to use PayPal's subscription button type in the module when payments don't reoccur.

Thanks,
Grant

kobnim’s picture

kobnim commented

Hi Grant,
After some investigation, it became clear that we wouldn't be able to customize paypal subscriptions for our needs, so I ended up using lm_paypal_donations.
Good luck!
Mindy