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Today in the Academy forums, Maren Kate asked an excellent question. It looks like she’s run into one of our biggest frustrations with 1ShoppingCart — they don’t handle Paypal recurring payments.

For those reading this and getting concerned about 1SC as a solution, don’t worry. We still recommend 1SC. In most cases it works awesome. Maren just happened to run into the case (as we did) where it breaks down. You only need to worry if you plan to accept recurring payments with both credit card and Paypal. Otherwise, all the confusion outlined below doesn’t apply to you.

You may never run into it, but if you do…here’s the rundown.

Question

oh my goodness! I am so frustrated! I have been going back and forth trying to find a decent shopping cart solution, merchant account & gateway service… who knew taking subscription payments online would be so hard!?

So here’s my issue: 1shoppingcart allows me to take credit cards & paypal one time payments… but NOT paypal subscriptions. Does anyone out there in the IBMA community have a membership site where you take both CCs & Paypal subscriptions? Please… throw me a rope or something!

I know on IBMA there was that option for either paypal or Credit card re-occuring payments…

Any pointers or suggestions would help! I’m so frazzled!

-Maren Kate

Answer

Believe me, Maren. We feel your pain. That’s one of my biggest frustrations with 1SC — that they don’t support recurring Paypal purchases.

For processing recurring memberships and payments, we use Amember. If the buyer selects Paypal, we send the straight to Paypal. If the buyer selects CC, they are sent through 1SC.

This is not a perfect solution, but it does the job. It does creates more admin for us on the back end. 1SC buyers are added automatically to our Academy newsletter, but Paypal buyers we have to give an opt-in form once Paypal sends them back to the thank you page. We later manually add them if they don’t add themselves (they opted in by buying).

The other big pain is if you want to have an affiliate program that pays recurring commissions. Tracking those becomes a headache that I won’t go into too much here. The problem is that 1SC doesn’t count the Paypal sales in the referring affiliates stats since it doesn’t “see” the sale at all. This is why we manually add new buyers to Academy newsletter. When we do this, 1SC at least counts them as a lead.

In the end, our affiliate payout process is probably tripled in complexity. For now we deal with it, but we’re in search of a better solution for accepting subscription payments or at least for managing the affiliate program.

This post is in: Q&A

Tags: 1ShoppingCart, Amember, Paypal