Subscriptions / Recurring billing?

[Success]

Recurring billing is very useful and quite common nowadays with many software.

To name a few...

Vbulletin offers paid Subscriptions with PayPal, WorldPay, NOCHEX and Authorize.net.

Membership scripts like aMember also offer recurring billing.

I agree with Michael, you don't need recurring billing with all the payment processors. Just a few, or even one, is good enough.

On the business side, recurring billing makes a lot of sense if your business model supports it and your target customers are willing to pay.

To presalesguy, Esvon classifieds offers subscription recurring billing.

But I would stay with 68.

And, it would be great if 68 offers recurring billing too.

Actually, I emailed Esvon because I had seen it mentioned that they did recurring billing. But they emailed back and said they don't do recurring billing in Esvon.

[Maffo +]

How with this system work? Im just playing devils advocate here. Lets say a customer placed 10 ads on your site. Would they be billed 10 times per month or once? 10 times seems a little stupid to me, plus the likes of paypal are taking a whole lot more of your cash. Lets say the user wants to place 12 ads the following month. They then have to subscribe again?

It needs properly thinking through this before a single line of code is written. Recurring billing is very simple if it is a fixed simple monthly amount. If not, it can be a bit of a nightmare.

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

Originally Posted by Maffo

It needs properly thinking through this before a single line of code is written. Recurring billing is very simple if it is a fixed simple monthly amount. If not, it can be a bit of a nightmare.

I agree with Maffo on this. The other part of this that hasn't even been mentioned is the simple fact that when the initial payment is made it is made for a specific purchase (e.g. 10 ads or whatever). In recurring billing, Paypal is simply charging them again for the "product", but what happens to that payment amount once it's collected from PayPal?

There is no user account to give a "credit" to. There is no product to apply the payment to, because the user hasn't actually generated a new invoice or initiated a charge yet.

-Mike

[Success]

You do not need to think about 10 or 100 ads.

Because each ad is placed/ordered individually.

You set the price for each ad to repeat for a specific number of days. When the number of days expires, if the user does not terminate the ad, the ad and billing continues.

So, at the point of placing an ad with recurring option, the user gets to choose single payment package or a recurring package.

For single payment, it's the usual stuff.

For recurring, the billing goes each cycle until the user terminates that ad.

For the next month/week/day, when the user wants to pay for another ad, he goes through the same thing; chosing a single payment or recurring payment.

When a recurring ad get placed, or terminated, it only affect that ad.

[Maffo +]

Im sure and have no doubt in my mind, if a system like that was made people would complain. A: the customer recieving 20 seperate invoices. b: Developers who think that it should handle this better. The user would have to sign up for subscriptions for each and every ad. I guess you dont see my point of view.

[Success]

Any place someone goes to place an ad, be it a classified or ebay, the person is paying for that individual ad, not a group of ads.

You have to sign up for each recurring ad, because every ad starts and ends at different date+time.

What do you suggest?

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by Success

Any place someone goes to place an ad, be it a classified or ebay, the person is paying for that individual ad, not a group of ads.

What do you suggest?

I think your idea would work fine for a site where you have a user posting an occasional ad that may take some time to sell. However I also see Maffos point that for sites where users place multiple long term listings it would be very cumbersome for the user and les profitable for the classified site owner due to the way transactions are billed.

This, like the membership system, is nearly impossible to create in a way where it suits everyones needs.

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

Originally Posted by Success

For recurring, the billing goes each cycle until the user terminates that ad.

For the next month/week/day, when the user wants to pay for another ad, he goes through the same thing; chosing a single payment or recurring payment.].

OK, I see your point in this scenario. I'm not trying to be argumentative, however this would still be quite complex in order to do that. SO, my question would be, "Why would you want to go through all of this trouble to get this recurring billing to work like that when you can already just add additional duration listing packages?"

Doing this is already built in. On my site as an example, a single photo ad with 500 characters for 10 days is $5.00. I then have the exact same package with a 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, 180 day and 365 days that are incrementally priced. I do the same with a 3-photo, 5-photo and 10-photo. The customer doesn't have to worry about recurring charges and chooses whatever duration that they want for their listing.

-Mike

[Success]

When you ordered a recurring ad, you get a receipt/invoice for that specific transaction every month.

So there's no escaping of multiple invoices.

Moreover, with the different start and end dates, I don't think you can bill a group of recurring ads.

Thus, you still need different invoices for different ads.