The answer can be found on the forum here.
It appears that at this time, Zen Cart is not set up to handle either subscription products or payment plans.
To achieve this, you'd need to sign up for a credit card merchant account that allows you to manually process credit card payments not just online, but offline (manual entry of customer's credit card information) as well.
You would then need to keep excellent records so you can manually enter the charges offline, using your merchant account software interface to process those charges/payments each month (or however often you plan to charge them for the product) for each subscriber.
You can get info on merchant accounts by googling 'merchant accounts', however PayPal's Website Payments Pro offers a built in merchant account that also allows offline credit card processing through a "virtual terminal" for the best price that I've seen (no equipment purchase or rental price, only a monthly fee of thirty dollars plus small transaction fees).
While you can certainly use that (paypal pro and/or it's merchant account) in Zen Cart for automated purchases, you'd still have to process the subscription charges/payments manually.
It's not as bothersome as it may sound, unless you have a huge subscriber list and/or want to run a store that requires very little of your time and attention (i.e. fully automated with little to no customer service and/or interaction).
Another benefit is that this option allows you to manually process payments for orders that come in via phone or fax, or for customers that are afraid of online shopping and sending their data over the internet.
Depending how many subscriptions or other manual orders get, and how much you plan to make from them should help you determine if the monthly fee is worth being able to offer this product to your customers.
Hope this helps :smile:
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