We have a small amember site which has been running successfully using the standard paypal_r plugin but with the recession we have seen price resistance where instead of one upfront payment of $150, people would like to make three easy payments of $50 over 3 months. Is the paypal_pro plugin with the PayPal Pro service the best way to do this? The basic idea is that the person signs up to pay the $150 but the billing is done in easy payments of $50 for the successive 3 months, but there is no easy way of cancelling after 1 or 2 months. Advice for dummies please!
I have set up payment plans for several of my packages, much like you are looking to do. In my case, I split it up across 6 months, which is the member term I was using before offering payment plans. Every once in a while I do get a member cancel their membership, which of course stops future payments from being processed. I know of no way to forcibly stop this from happening. The best you can do is to hold back on some of your member benefits until after the payments have been made, so they have to make all payments before receiving all of their member benefits. This could be a series of bonuses that are spread out over a period of time, if you cannot hold back on any of the core membership content or services.