Does NOPCommerce Support a Subscription Model?

I love NOPCommerce! Kudos on hard work. Is there any kind of enterprise version which allows me to create a subscription model for the website?

nopCommerce supports recurring products. But paid membership is not supported (it's on our roadmap)

Hi Andrei

Can you explain further:

I am not sure what the difference is between a Paid Subscription and a Recurring Product.

I assume a recurring product means the Shopper will be sold this product a recurring number of times.

How is this different to a Paid Subscription?

I am trying to implement this feature now.

The Recurring Product section looks really promising.
Well done and many thanks.
Steve

What is the difference between paid membership and recurring products?

Surely they are the same thing!!!

F430 wrote:
Paid membership - you pay for registration (e.g. adult sites)
Recurring products - you pay each recurring period for a product (e.g. licensed software)

Hi,

Sorry, Still Really Confused.

Does it matter what you pay for, as long as the payment recurs?

If I setup a recurring payment, whether it is for a subscription to a magazine, newsletter etc, or whether it is for a membership to a club, how does NopCommerce know the difference? (or care).

I would be grateful if you could clarify this, as I think there is real confusion among the community over the whole issue, and difference between Subscriptions and Recurring Payments (or it could just be me).

I have very successfully set NopCommerce up to do Subscription Billing (or at least I think I have).

Clearly there is no way of knowing if the payment has been made though (at the moment). But this is easy.
A simple trigger on the payment table in the database can 'call a custom component' to notify some web service somewhere to say the payment has been made.

If this is the limitation you are referring to, then we should clarify this as a business process limitation, rather than a limitation of NopCommerce.

SCENARIO
When a product with a Recurring Payment is purchased, a call to PayPal Direct (or Authorize.net) is made, which sets up a Recurring Payment Plan in the PayPal Account. This willl take the first payment immediately, and subsequent payments thereafter based on the Recurring Period defined in the Product Details.

LIMITATION
NopCommerce does not make a 'call' or 'trigger' to any third party system to confirm this payment has been made.
QUESTION
In fact, I am not sure if NopCommerce is ever updated by PayPal to 'know' if the payment has been made.
i.e. Does it use Instant Payment Notification (IPN) to update the NopCommerce database to confirm if payment has been made?

Best Regards
Steve

PS.
OBSERVATION
I do not like this Recurring Payment model, as I think the job of requesting payments should have been handled by NopCommerce, rather than the Payment Gateway. That way, you could have supported any Gateway, just by simply submitting the credit card details again on a recurring basis.
It would have required support for 'SQL Jobs' in NopCommerce, which is not supported by SQL Server Express. But there are other (easy) ways to get SQL Server Express to run Jobs without the need for the full version of SQL.
The other requirement, would be for the NopCommerce Account Holder to have a way to manage their Payment Methods (or Credit Cards) from within their Account Panel (just like PayPal). This does step into the realms of bigger responsibilities, and hosting your NopCommerce installation on a PCI compliant hosting platform, and ensuring you have applied for the appropriate documents from your hosting provider.

However, this is just an alternative view, and your implementation appears to work just fine, with a simpler setup, though it limits the number of Payment Gateways and Methods you can work with.

Just a quick note...i know this was a long time ago but maybe some one else has the same "observation" ...in order for any ecommerce platform to "submit" recurring payment requests it would require the system to store the payment information for each customer...this is NOT something you want to do..better to have the payment capture service do that. It should be configured such that the eCommerce system receives confirmation that the payment has been "re-captured" for a given customer.

Yes, you are correct, there should be scheduled calls to the "Auto-Pay" or "Subscription" set-up with the payment provider.

Usually though most providers would have special APIs to enable "recurring billing" (all synonyms as far as I know).

Typically the API to setup a recurring billing/auto-pay/subscription would be via a POST method call with details such as
- billing period: e.g. monthly
- start date
- end date
- initial amount (charged during setup)
- trial period (if any)
- trial period amount (free trial)
- maximum billing amount (e.g. if there is a failed payment and your system can add it up in the next payment request)

Every month you can then make a payment request with the subscription id.

A nice example is the citrus Vault and Subscription APIs

As this was asked a long time ago, I can assume either the demand for the feature or the platform has reduced. I would not like to think its the feature as 'cloud' and 'digital' and Pay-as-u-go are the in things.

What say nopCommerce? Time to upgrade?

Hello,
I was trying to find an update to this topic.  I have a scenario, where I would like to setup subscription billing for support services with a customer.  I also have the same scenario where they are paying for subscription software each month.  Does NC support this?  Will the recurring payments work for this?

Thanks for the help!

madv1457 wrote:
If I understand your needs well, the answer is Yes