Is there a way to do this payment scheme for website ecommerce

[Brad123]

Say I had a website that people could sell things on and I wanted to charge the seller £1 each time they wanted to place an advert or a £5 monthly subscription is this possible.


How would i regulate and control this so that if a person wanted to place an advert they had to pay £1 each time they visited my site to place an advert or they can choose an option whereby they pay a recurring monthly fee of £5. Is this possible. Could you do it using some type of forums software perhaps.

:)

[Padwah]

recursive billings of less than five pounds aren't really worth it due to the transaction fees by most creditcard processors, but you can do it with most people like Paypal, Worldpay etc.

I'm not sure about paypal but I know with world pay you can set up recursive billings automatically, you just need to set the interval of billing and it will do it all for you.

I'm not entirely sure what it is you are trying to do, I'm guessig it's something to do with your holiay venture, but it may be better to offer people to buy 'credits' that they can use to buy the adverts. That way you can charge people for £20 for 10 credits that they can redeem as necassary.

That may not make sense but I'm drunk so sue me :)

[Brad123]

Ah good idea, ill reply more in the morning, are you experienced in this sort of thing.

Its to allow people to swap certain things, its totally seperate from the holiday stuff.

Basically people all over the UK want to swap certain things and they pay a quid each time to do it so each time they want to swap a certain item they pay 1 pound or they can subscribe and pay a monthly fee of £5 for4 unlimted items they can advertise, it will be a certain product not a general thing.

Im trying to find which is the best way to do it.

[GreyJackal]

You'd need a database to keep track of who paid when, whether they paid for a single or a recurring thingy, and a timed job to repeat the billing automatically if required.

Using something like Worldpay to manage the recurring billings would be a bit of a nightmare as you'd have to keep track at your end when the person wants to cancel and then change the WorldPay entry, massively increasing the human error factor (ie say you were on holiday when they emailed you to cancel). Unless they offer some sort of automatic process which, as it would require an automated entry into their db, I'd suspect can't be done. I would imagine it's more geared towards the person actually making the payment rather than a 3rd party intermediary service provider or retailer.

It's not too difficult in the grand scheme of things, but if you have no experience with databases then obviously you'd need to find someone who can do it for you.

Actually, thinking back on this, I would be VERY surprised if someone hadn't written some MySQL or mSQL scripts to do exactly this kind of thing (don't know if those two support stored procedures a la Oracle - that would be even better).