Alex (and anybody else that can jump in), I am doing a presentation on "How to Build a Membership Style Website" at our local Web Meetup group on the evening of 4/21. I will talk about several options but will focus on the WordPress / aMember integration. I have used aMember for a long time and am currently testing the new WordPress plugin. I am using aMember to handle site registrations and have not implemented ecommerce yet (will be doing that next month). Therefore, I wanted to clear up a few questions on the CC payment solutions so I can give out the correct information to the group. I will number the questions in case it makes it easier for those that respond. PayPal Standard I feel pretty confident on this one, so I will explain it as I understand it and let me know if I am wrong on this. With PayPal Standard the customer is taken to the PayPal site to complete the transaction. aMember passes all the information and variables of a recurring subscription product over to PayPal and the product is crerated "on-the-fly" After the transaction is completed on the PayPal site, the customer can be redirected back to the original site. PayPal sends aMember an IPN to start the subscription PayPal sends another IPN to aMember when the subscription gets canceled or reaches the end of its life The user's subscription will terminate at the end of the billing cycle following the above mentioned IPN All CC info is held by PayPal and nothing but a transaction number is kept on the server that hosts aMember. Question 1: Is this pretty much right? PayPal Pro According to the PayPal website, with PayPal Pro,the user never leaves the website. So... Question 2: Does this mean that the server hosting aMember now stores the CC information or is the CC info still somehow stored only with PayPal? Question 3: Does PayPal Pro still handle recurring payments using the same IPN scheme as PayPal uses? Google Checkout Google Checkout's documentation talks about "Google-Handled Subscriptions" and "Merchant-Handled Subscriptions". What technique does aMember use? Question 4: Can I assume aMember uses Google-Handled Subscriptions and uses an IPN scheme similar to PayPal Standard? Question 5: With Google Checkout, do you have to store the customers CC information on the aMember server? Question 6: Does Google offer an option like PayPal Pro where the user can stay on the site for a seamless transaction? Thanks in advance on any help with this and sorry about the short notice!
Grant, 1. Correct 2. No. CC info will not be stored in aMember but will be taken on your site. aMember will take CC info and will create payment profile on paypal. Then aMember will store only profile id in database. 3. Yes correct Paypal PRO plugin use IPN notifications to handle recurring billing the same way as paypal_r 4. Google checkout plugin use Merchant Handled subscriptions and use IPN notifications to handle recurring payments. 5. No. CC info is not stored in aMember. 6. Unfortunately no.