I am having a dilemma here and hoping someone in the community has figured this out. I want to be able to sell memberships with a 1 month free trial, but I don't want to have my membership payments re-occur. I was planning to use PayPal to process payments. PayPal can do the free trial, but has the following issues (at least with PayPal Standard). 1) To offer free trials you must set the payment to re-occurring. 2) To get around item#1 I can set the PayPal payments to stop after X number of payments have been made. This works great except the X has to be > 1. This means that after the free trial period has ended there is will at least 2 re-occurring payments (so still re-occuring). 3) To get around item #2 I have adjusted my prices to occur in 2 installments. So if my subscription is for 1 year for $50 I actually set the subscription up as a 6-month subscription for $25.00 with 2 payment installments. 4) All of the above is working fine (even if it's a bit confusing) except that now all of the membership expiration dates are set to 12/31/2012. This means that as a member reaches the end of the 2nd 6-months of their membership they won't get any reminder emails or indication that their subscription is expiring since there really isn't a true expiration date in aMember. The member.php also doesn't list an expiration date, but says 'Reccurr', or something similar I believe. So is there any way to offer a free-trial period, but not have payments re-occur? I am looking into switching to PayPal Pro, but I can't tell if that would make any difference. I am open to other solutions or payment processors.
When the payment renews, or expires the membership expiration dates are set to 12/31/2012 will change to the proper expiration date. Think you may be getting ahead of yourself. David
Even if you will switch to paypal_pro expiration emails will not be sent, because product still wil be recurring. Modification will be recuired in common.inc.php if order to send expiration emails to recurring products.
Ok. So the answer seems to be that it is impossible to offer a free trial in aMember without also requiring a re-ocurring payment. Is that right? If so that is disappointing. All I want to do is offer a free trail and then just charge my customer once for their paid subscription. After the initial free trial and membership term it should just expire. I shouldn't have to force them onto an auto-renewing plan just because I want to give them a free trial.
This is a paypal issue- the system doesnt allow a free trial followed by a single payment. You can do it with 2 payments. David
It's possible. Set it to recurring payment with Free Trial and set the Recurring Times to 1. At least that's what worked for me the other day on a client's installation...
Thanks everyone for your help (esp. Alex and his team). I've ultimately decided that PayPal is broken when it comes to offering a simple free trial and no re-occurring payments. (miso, the 1 time recurring didn't work for me, at least not with PayPal Pro). I have changed my plans and will just not offer a free trial. Unless someone know a payment processor that can do a free trial and non-recurring payments, but I asked this question elsewhere on the forum and was told no one could do it.
You could use a coupon code with a 100% discount. Then an expiration email could be sent at the end of 30 days inviting them to sign-up for the paid product.