Ubercart

chadcrew - Paypal does allow for recurring payments, but the problem here is that we need to keep track of this in Drupal (this is for accounting purposes). I haven't gotten really deep into this yet, and I still need to have a meeting with a few people to nail down some more of the details, so I will let you know all of that once I know and kind of where we are headed. I assumed that it would be the case of what Ryan wrote just after you. I just wanted to find out if I was missing something before I took off on a journey of writing this module. I have some experience writing modules using ubercart, but I have never dealt with billing directly, and since it such an important concept, I just want to get the best idea. There will be lots of research to come, but I want to get the best idea of where to look. According to Ryan I will look through the Paypal module, and I will look about setting this up as a recurring fee (to be honest I don't know how this works yet as I have not actually enabled the module or played around with it yet).

After doing some research into this, I don't believe this is what we want. The main reason being that the recurring fee handling in Paypal allows a user to cancel at any time. However, the module that we are looking to develop will be more of a payment plan that we will charge them 3 times in a month. After thinking about your questions some more, I have come to the conclusion that the product is received before full payment is completed. Thus, we don't want the user to be able to cancel payments in the middle of the billing process. This isn't a subscription. They either buy the course or they don't. We just want to give them the option of making payments on the course over a certain period (as I write this it seems like we are extending credit in a sense and we are using Paypal to collect the money, whereas we are just holding on to the balance owed). Anyways, any other thoughts that you might have would be great.

What about a Feature as Ryan suggested for "Payment type: Full" and "Payment type: Partial" with an extra option to allow for cancellation? I can see where this would be a good option to have, such as in the cases of online courses where you can't cancel. Checking this option box would allow for an additional message upon product completion (or in the product description itself) saying that "The recurring fee cannot be canceled and you will be billed the full amount after x duration."

This could even work for subscription products that need such an option. Perhaps then the meseage would be customizable to be more descriptive, e.g. "You cannot cancel this subscription through the account interface; you must email us." I don't think that's the best way to go about subscriptions, of course, but I think the issue still remains that this option would need to be in place for certain products, such as courses. Instead of breaking it out into two modules, keeping everything rolled into one is probably the best bet.

My two cents, anyway.

Ok. I got some good ideas about this today. I had a meeting with the client and they gave me an idea or thought on what they envisioned. The funny thing is that I had basically came up with this same idea earlier today. The basic plan is to make a new payment type which would be a payment plan. The administrator can then select which other payment type (besides the Payment Plan) that a user can use to make their payments. Also, they will be able to select their payment plan. The user then will complete checkout and the Payment Plan module will charge them based off of the plan selected using the method (payment type) that they selected. Then, similar to uc_recurring, a cron job will charge them according to their payment plan by the method they selected on checkout.

Any thoughts on this? Any potential problems with this module that anyone sees? Would other be interested in such a module? Let me know your thoughts before I dive in.

i was thinking of something like this

http://www.ubercart.org/forum/support/8360/create_manual_order_full_paym...

then u can just alter the form to say pay later when using the other payment gateway.

EDIT : I just posted a new topic about my use case at http://www.ubercart.org/forum/development/14435/payment_plan.

http://www.drupal.org/project/uc_recurring does not help with the use-case for allowing a customer to pay for an entire order over 3 payments.

I don't care about keeping CC info in the database, just payment history (viewable by customer). Basically, i want to allow the option to pay over 3 installments. The first would be paid at checkout. Then the system would send out email reminders that the payment is due with a link to allow for payment. They can chose a payment method to pay. They could potentially use 3 different payment methods to pay for one order.

I've seen requests for allowing for "pay over time" and just no real solution. I need this on multiple sites and I'm willing to pay for development. Anyone's input would be appreciated.