Integration with WP-InstantPay

[amarmehta]

Hi Guys,

I have been looking for good membership plugin for WP and stumbled upon S2Member. It's really strong and beats many paid alternatives, just downloaded it and I was wondering if I could configure it with other plug-in that is used for accepting payments.

Wp InstantPay that was launched month allows Paypal Adaptive Payments, currently they are allowing product delivery as zip file, but they are in the process of adding subscriptions and other possibilities. Since, I like the concept of membership, I thought of integrating WP InstantPay with s2Member, but I couldn't find any place/details for doing this. I couldn't find different registration URLs for different membership levels, that I can pass as different product URLs to WP InstantPay.

Can you please help me with this?

Thank you for your time and energy.

Amar

[Cristián Lávaque]

Hi Amar. I'm glad you're liking s2Member.

I'm not familiar with that plugin, really, so I can't comment on it. If you want to serve protected files, though, s2Member does that too, so maybe you don't need another plugin after all.

WP Admin -> s2Member -> Download Options
http://www.s2member.com/file-download-options-video/

Does that help?

[amarmehta]

Hi Cristian,

Thank you for the prompt response. I want to use WP InstantPay not to protect the files but to use Paypal's Adaptive Payment feature, which allows Instant Payment split between merchant and affiliate, so, even if it is 50% commission program, the affiliates get commission as soon as the purchase is made.

That's why I want to use WP InstantPay for processing payments and s2Member to create and manage membership area.

Hope this explains my need/purpose.

Please let me know if you need more details.

Thanks again for your time and energy.

[Cristián Lávaque]

Got it. I'll ask Jason about it.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks for the excellent question.
~ and thanks for the heads up Cristián.

I'm not familiar with that plugin yet either.
Does WP InstantPay create new User accounts in WordPress?

You said, "product URLs to WP InstantPay".
Can you elaborate on this just a bit.
What is it exactly that you need to do?

You might take a look at this post:
viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2819&p=8343&hilit=register_link_gen#p8342

[Cristián Lávaque]

He explains it here:

I want to use WP InstantPay not to protect the files but to use Paypal's Adaptive Payment feature, which allows Instant Payment split between merchant and affiliate, so, even if it is 50% commission program, the affiliates get commission as soon as the purchase is made.

That's why I want to use WP InstantPay for processing payments and s2Member to create and manage membership area.

Sorry, Jason. I confused the names in the email I sent you and said PayPal's Instant Pay instead of Adaptive Payment, confusing the PayPal service with the WordPress plugin.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks. I'm sorry though, I'm just not familiar with this company yet. I'll try to take a closer look asap though. Until then, if ( amarmehta ) has any other specifics, that would be great. I'm sure we can get you where you need to be, but I just need some help understanding the way this plugin works exactly.

[klawncare1239]

I too am interested in this capability. I don't really much care about the other plugin. I just want the capability to track affiliate referrals and then have any subsequent paid memberships pass through PayPal Adaptive Payments system and divide the payment between me and the referring affiliate.

Seems like this would be a perfect addition to the S2Member plugin, offering a perfect 1-2 punch that doesn't require any additional affiliate plugin or service.

[Jason Caldwell]

I too am interested in this capability. I don't really much care about the other plugin. I just want the capability to track affiliate referrals and then have any subsequent paid memberships pass through PayPal Adaptive Payments system and divide the payment between me and the referring affiliate.

Seems like this would be a perfect addition to the S2Member plugin, offering a perfect 1-2 punch that doesn't require any additional affiliate plugin or service.

In this case, I would highly recommend iDevAffiliate. You can learn more about how to integrate iDevAffiliate with s2Member, in your Dashboard, see: s2Member -> API Tracking -> iDevAffiliate. You can also search the forums here for iDevAffiliate, as many s2Member site owners use this.

[klawncare1239]

It did not seem that IdevAffiliate offered the capability for automatic affiliate payments. It seems that I would have to make the payouts manually, which I'm trying to avoid. It's not the end of the world if I must go this route. I was just hoping to find a solution that didn't require manual payouts. Both IdevAffiliate and WP-Affiliate seem to require me to manually do the payout.

[Jason Caldwell]

I see. Yea, I know that iDevAffiliate does require manual payouts. In practice, you might find that to be more ideal, even though it's more work. I do, at least. Sorry though, I'm not aware of another affiliate software application that runs on your server, with a worthy feature set, which also allows for automatic payouts. That might be a good feature request for the iDev team. I'll let them know.

[klawncare1239]

Jason,

Thank you for your input. Curious. If I am to do manual payouts, then I'm left with Idev or WP-Affiliate. Any thoughts on why I would want to choose one over the other, since it appears that both integrate with S2Member relatively well at this point.

Sorry for taking your time, but I really want to set this up "right" the first time - at least as best I can.

[Jason Caldwell]

Well, I like both of these applications. However, I prefer iDevAffiliate myself.

There are many reasons, but here are a few:

- It lives outside of WordPress. WordPress is a content management system, it's not an affiliate portal. I'm all for extending WordPress in creative ways, but some highly specialized applications are better off on their own, and IMO an affiliate management system is and should remain a stand-alone application.

- iDevAffiliate has been around MUCH longer ( i.e. tested heavily ).
- iDevAffiliate has a larger feature set ( i.e. more powerful ).
- iDevAffiliate can be re-branded easily.
- s2Member has been integrated with everything iDev has to offer, and I know this software better; allowing us to provide better support for the s2Member/iDev combination.

[klawncare1239]

I appreciate your candor. Thank you. That gives me some good info to mull over.

[klawncare1239]

Jason,

Do you know anything about PayPal Adaptive Payments? Using this method, it is possible to "split" a customer payment between multiple recipients (for instance, a site owner and a referring affiliate) via Chained Payments. The customer only knows about the site owner.

I've posted a "job" related to trying to make this work with S2Member - in other words, having a script that sits between S2Member and PayPal which allows S2Member to work with PayPal Adaptive Payments instead of the standard PayPal system - which would then allow for the possibility of "splitting" these payments at the time of payment instead of making payments later.

Another benefit here, as the "InstantPay" plugin touts, is that affiliates are paid immediately on every sale instead of monthly or after they reach a certain payout amount.

So, I'm thinking every blog member (paid or free) could automatically be an "affiliate" where their blog username is their affiliate ID. A simple script would watch for a query string in all incoming links to find an affiliate ID. If one exists, it's tied to that visitor and is saved as a field in their database record if they setup a free account on the blog.

On my "affiliate" page, I would simply provide an extra custom field for them to add their PayPal email address to their user information.

Then, if one of their referrals decide to upgrade to a paid membership, this new script/plugin would check their database record for a referring ID. If found, it would search the database for the blog user with that username and grab their PayPal account email address.

At that point, the order would be forwarded to PayPal as usual, but using the Adaptive Payments method where the payment would be split between myself (the site owner) and the original referring affiliate.

I can see that it should be relatively simple to create the "front-end" processing script to track the initial referrals and "bind" registered users to their original referring member.

What I"m not sure of is just how complicated it would be to force S2Member to function through PayPal Adaptive Payments instead of through the standard Paypal payment methods. I'm not sure how it differs or what would be necessary to make it work.

I'm willing to pay for custom programming to make it work, but I'm a bit nervous that such a system might be potentially "broken" anytime I update my S2Member PRO plugin.

Thoughts? Rough estimates of how much work would be required for a programmer to accomplish the above - in terms of actual hours on task? Interest on your end to try and make something like this work as an add-on feature to S2Member?

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks for the follow-up.

If you can please send me a private email through this contact form:
http://www.s2member.com/contact/

That contact form will allow you to reference this thread, and I'll get you a quote on this via email. Thanks!