Subscription Option

Hi.

I'm developing a new website that requires an "Advertiser Subscription" option whereby users select a cart item for monthly, quarterley or annual subscription.

Now I know I can create the cart and items reasonably easily. However, I was wondering if Hika has a facility to AutoMail users when their subscription is due...

Hi,

Not really as there is no subscription feature in HikaShop.
There is a way however to achieve that by using our integration with AcyMailing. You would have to get the Enterprise version of AcyMailing in order to create auto filters to assign users to specific AcyMailing lists when they buy your products and send the reminders and remove them from these lists automatically.

Thanks Nicolas...

Hi Nicolas,

i would like to understand the subscription mode using AcyMailing enterprise.
i have bought both components so there is no problem in my case.
My questions are more about the process how to do it.
so if i understood correctly:

1. in acymailing you should have a list PER PRODUCT

2. when user purchase a product, you should add it to SPECIFIC PRODUCT LIST
Q: how do you add a user to specific product list (process and where in the code/views) ?

3. in case customer wants to download again software/product he subscribed, you CHECK THE DATE when he was added to product list and if date is ok, so you allow him to download new version
Q: how do you control the date, and allow him to download again new version ? how to you remove him from the list in case subscription is ended ?

It could be great to have a tutorial how to do it because we are several who bought both components to do such thing and nothing is written to manage it correctly.
thx.

You actually don't have to create lists in AcyMailing.

You will have to create one filter per product via the menu List->Filter.
The first one will have a filter like that:
hikashop customer has bought "product name" and a date limitation like that:
"{time}-31643326<creation date<{time}-31556926"
hikashop customer has not bought "product name" and a date limitation like that:
"{time}-31556926<creation date"

31556926 is the number of seconds of a subscription.31643326 is the number of seconds of a subscription plus the number of seconds of one day (because the filter is triggered once every day).

with the action:
AcyMailing newsletter send "newsletter name"

and the auto filter :
Every day (cron)


Regarding the download of files itself, the period is actually defined in the configuration of HikaShop, under the Files area. However, you can only have one period for all the products. Which means that you can't have a product with a file available for 6 months and another one with a file available for 1 year.


We are currently working on an integration with akeeba subscription which we will release soon (next month hopefully) which will allow you to have a real subscription system integrated with HikaShop.

Is it on the roadmap to make hikashop able to set up a Recurring payment with Paypal and Authorize.net?

It would be nice to be able to create a "Membership" product with Hikshop that assigns the user to a certain User Group after they purchase it just like hikashop can do now, but rather than make a one time payment for the product, the user is sent to paypal or authorize.net to set up the recurring payment.

That way we could automatically bill the customer monthly for them to be a part of the User Group we created for them to have access to content and products on the site for members only.

When I first looked at Hikashop I confused what you call Affiliates with Subscription which is what we were looking for.

I don't know if you guys are talking about the same thing.

What we would like to see is an option for customers to recieve the same product each week, 15 days month etc, I guess that's a suscription to a product, usually with a discount assigned.

About the payment for these most will do a bank transfer so not a big deal but would be awesome if that recurring payment with Paypal and Authorize.net is possible.

And how would Hikashop deal with creating this "automatic orders" :whistle:

nicolas wrote: You will have to create one filter per product via the menu List->Filter.
The first one will have a filter like that:
hikashop customer has bought "product name" and a date limitation like that:
"{time}-31643326<creation date<{time}-31556926"
hikashop customer has not bought "product name" and a date limitation like that:
"{time}-31556926<creation date"

31556926 is the number of seconds of a subscription.31643326 is the number of seconds of a subscription plus the number of seconds of one day (because the filter is triggered once every day).

with the action:
AcyMailing newsletter send "newsletter name"

and the auto filter :
Every day (cron)

Hi Nicolas,

i have several questions regarding your last post and AcyMailing filters:
1)a day has 24*60*60 seconds, so 86.400 seconds. Therefore, 365 days are 365*86.400 = 31.536.000 seconds and 366 days are 366*86.400 = 31.622.400 seconds.
why did you write "{time}-31643326<creation date<{time}-31556926" and "{time}-31556926<creation date" for filter ? those times in seconds are 365.24 days and 366.24 days.
What is the purpose behind that ? Maybe i misunderstood something...

2) what is the purpose of the send "newsletter name" for the filter if there is no Product list" ?
or maybe you call "newsletter name" the "weldon mail, you bought product XY" ?
what i do not understand here is that if the newsletter is a standard newsletter of the product, you need to update this filter each time a "new" newsletter for this product is available.
so what do you mean by that ?

thx.

Recurring payments is something we had in mind. But really complex to add into hikashop. The problem is that each payment plateform will handle that differently and some won't handle it at all.
So first, it's something which has to be done both in HikaShop and in the payment plugins while handling intelligently the cases when some payment plugins don't handle recurring payments while others do, when a user tries to order recurring and non recurring products at the same time, the generation of the orders for the recurring system which also depends on the payment plateform way of doing things, etc.

In short, it's really complex to do it right. So it's in the roadmap but quite far for now...

@alain.roger
1. I just typed 1 year in seconds on google.com and that's the result I got
My example is just that, an example. If you prefer to use 31536000 instead, go ahead.

2. "newsletter name" will be a newsletter that you created for that product. It will be sent to the user at the end of the subscription to remind him to pay again to renew.
The goal of that auto filter is that at the end of the subscription period an email is sent to the user.

Hi Nicolas

Think about Recurring orders instead of payments.

There are methods where you don't have to deal with programming in sense of payments:

i.e: cash on delivery or bank transfer (in both cases shop admins will confirm the status of the orders).

Would be a nice addon to see.

Regards

Sure but when you develop an application, you need to think about all the cases before starting a feature. Because once you release the first version like what you're talking about, the next requests will be to support recurring payments too.

In fact, what you're talking about is not recurring payments but subscriptions where people are notified that their subscriptions need to be renewed and will have to place about an order on the website to renew. And that's something which will be possible with our integration to akeeba subscriptions.

Nicolas is right. There are other factors that you have to consider when trying to mix regular products with subscription (recurring payment) products.

Have you looked at how other shopping carts handle this?

The main payment methods that we use for Recurring billing on the subscriptions are Paypal and Authorize.net.

I think if those two payment plugins were set up to process recurring payments, then that would be sufficient for now.

For the products, you just need an option in the product details to determine if the product is a recurring payment product or not.

When someone adds a recurring payment product to the shopping cart, you can just check the cart to see if there are already regular products in the cart or not.
If there are regular products in the cart, then you put up a message that tells the customer, they must purchase or remove the existing products in the shopping cart before they can purchase the subscription/recurring payment product.

If there are not products already in the cart, then you let them add the subscription product to the cart and take them right to checkout to pay for the subscription.

When a recurring payment product is in the cart, then the only payment methods/plugins that will show as options at checkout, are the ones that have the ability to process recurring payments.

If a user has added a recurring payment product to their cart and then tries to add a regular product to the cart, a similar message would show, letting them know that they need to either pay for their subscription product or remove it from the cart before they can add the regular item to the cart.

That is how I would do it. In summary, make it so you can only have regular products or recurring payment products in the cart, but not both types at the same time. And when it is a recurring payment product, only show the payment methods that have plugins with the ability to set up a recurring payment.

Yes, good analysis, that's what we have in mind.

Well sirs, the topic is about suscription and not recurring payments

I agree with both of you but understand that what we are requesting is something much more simple which doesn't involve programming for plugins etc which hey, would be awesome.

Nicolas a suscription is for example paying for 3 months to recieve a product each 15 days, but you need to pay that suscription for 3 months, 6 or whatever.

Im asking about what we call "pedidos periodicos" (periodic orders? don't know the word in english soz)

But this doesn't mean having to pay a suscription but just a customer saying that they want to recieve the same product each 15 or 30 days, each week or month - this could have a discount attached.

You will pay by cash on delivery or bank transfer so no involvemente of payment plugins, how will Hikashop deal with that or autocreate that order, no idea.

Maybe that can be managed with that akeeba suscription integration you are talking about but is not exactly the same as a suscription but I guess that could be a solution.

Regards