Paid Memberships

I've used Zen-Cart on a few sites with decent success.

Now, I've got an odd customer requirement:

Users should have to pay a fee once a year to be able to see prices and buy goods.

While there are a few carts (ZC included) which will suppress prices for the non-logged-in user, I've not seen a "pay once a year to subscribe" feature.

What I was pondering was:

Where the price and add-to-cart controls would normally be displayed, replace it with a code block which would say "Am I a logged in user? Is my subscription still in effect?" If so, display the normal content. Otherwise display a link to buy the subscription.

If so, how can I do the following most easily:

• Calculate the email address of a logged-in user.

It looks like "select zen_customers.customers_email_address from zen_whos_online,zen_customers where zen_customers.customersid = zen_whos_online.customerid and zen_whos_online.sessid = "".$_COOKIE["zenid"]."""

should get me the customer's email address. If I then use a table of "[email protected] expires at timestamp 1234567890123", I could switch. Is there a better way, especially considering that the email may need to be retrieved for the renewal page, which will be outside the main flow of the site?

• Work around the "price" and "add to cart" rendering.

I'm thinking the files corresponding to the category listing, the search results, and the individual product display will all need tweaks. What are those, off-hand?

Alternatively, is there a boxed solution to this? I didn't see anything quite like it on add-ons. I could even well see using another cart entirely if there's one built to handle this need (Zen does lots of stuff probably not needed.)

For monthly, annually payment both Paypal and your credit card merchant should have the option to do that. I don't know how you do that on Paypal, but on Linkpoint you can set up any payment as "repeating". Of course it would be better if ZC can help to set that automatically for you, but it will also depend on your CC merchant.

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=492
One Time Membership mod at above could be useful.

Revised after speaking with client:

They want regular users to shop, but they want the ability to buy a discount membership. They seem to want the membership to be manually renewed once a year (handling recurrent payments with the site aware of them is hell :yuck:)

I'm thinking:

Group Pricing Per Item and Online Group Pricing alterations to get the multiple price classes.

Add a seperate page that lets a user buy a membership. This page, when the payment is confirmed, would change the user's pricing group, and add a record "email / expiry date". It's actually preferrable to have it a seperate process, IMO, because the client wants membership payments to be handled by a seperate entity, which probably means a seperate account.

Then on a cron job once a day, or perhaps as part of a page that gets loaded all the time, set the group back to "none" on all accounts past their expiry date. Also, delete all records of email/expiry date which have expired, so we don't have moving people from "none" to "none" group

Is there a file which is ran on each page generation which would be suitable for attaching that "reset the account levels" code?

Is it a real pain to get access to all the different prices (not just the current user level's price) for display with Group Pricing? We're thinking about featured item display boxes saying "$150 non-members, $90 with membership A, $80 with membership B!"