Paypal & Reoccuring Orders

[bislewl]

Has anyone wrote a module for this yet?

I have done some digging around, and it looks like there was one, but was buggy. But the link no longer works and countless posts on different boards with no answers. I saw some one did PayPal UK for OS Commerce, but that was from 4 years ago.


Not sure why no one has done this, is it impossible to code? Has anyone ever tried this before?

Is this a desirable module?

Thanks, for your help in advance

[DrByte]

It's one thing to tell the gateway to keep billing a credit card. It's quite another to set up all the requirements in your products to know all the correct variations on that recurring billing plan (how many payments, how frequently, what amount, how much in first payment and then how much in subsequent payments, and so on). And yet another to establish a way of correctly adding those repeat "sales" to your store as new orders, so that there's an invoice to match the billing activity.
Thus far nobody has written all those things and shared them.

[jcbazemore]

I had a thought about a potential work around for this that may not be acceptable or even work but I've got to throw it out there. It also does not account for someone going directly to PayPal or other payment processor and stopping the recurring billing "behind the store owner's back." This is my first store and I'm just starting to get things setup. I desperately want this feature to work because a Coffee Club is a key part of our offering. My cart is v1.5 installed via 1-click from Host Gator so I don't know much about it yet.

1. Add "Recurring" as an option for the Order Status in the database. After the recurring payment is setup with the Payment Processor (ie. PayPal Pro or anyone that does the recurring payments for you) the order is placed into the Recurring status and stays that way until they decide to stop receiving the product.
2. Each night a Cron job or scheduled task is run that will:
a. Query the database for any "Recurring" orders with yesterday's Day of the month (the 27th for example.) I'm saying Yesterday assuming the job will execute in the early morning hours. This would also need to account for the 31st on months that don't have 31 days and for "missing" days in February.
b. Create a new order using the details of the Recurring order and place it into a "Processing" status. Assuming that payment details are stored with each order it could put the original info there as well.
3. When the customer wishes to stop receiving the order it gets moved to a "Complete" status so that the next month when the Cron job runs it will not see that order.

This method only accounts for Monthly rebills and I'm sure has several other flaws as well. As I said before this is my first store and what I don't know about this whole process could fill a warehouse so please excuse any obvious errors above. Hopefully my intention for how I see this work around going is clear enough. I don't know if ZC has any automated processes built into it like daily Cron jobs or if something other than ZC messing with the DB would mess things up. If we can get this working for even just our first dozen clients we may have enough to pay a developer to make a proper module for us that will do the whole process in a cleaner manner. Feel free to rip this idea to shreds but hopefully this will spark something with a developer even if my plan will not work.