s2Member and CCBill signup form questions

[tripleaaadelay]

Hi Primo Team, Happy New Year!

I have s2Member working with the CCBill sign up form for the first time, but I have two areas of concerns:

1.) Using Dynamic Pricing and s2Members buttons, the CCBill signup form does not show currency conversion which is a typical and important part of the form. Is there a solution for this? This is a make it or break it for me. This can result in a huge sales difference.

2.) By default, CCBill lets the customer create a Username and Password on their signup form. (They also handle Username and Password changes when employing this option if you didn't know.) s2Members instructions have me disable the CCBill Un/Pw fields and the customer creates them through a second email they receive after they receive the first CCBill "thank you for signing up" email. I don't like this idea of adding this extra step for customers. Can s2Member be set up so the CCBill UN/PW fields can be used?

Thanks for the help in 2011. Looking forward to a big year in 2012!
Arigato from Japan,
triple

[Cristián Lávaque]

Well, I emailed Jason about this, because I don't know the answers myself. But could you explain some more what you mean by dynamic pricing? Are you using s2Member's shortcode buttons for ccBill or did you customize this in some way? If you did, please post any code you created for it.

Thanks!

[tripleaaadelay]

Cristián, Thanks for the post.

"Dynamic Pricing" is simply a CCBill option that has to be turned "on" according to the s2Member instructions. I'm using the shortcode buttons and have not customized anything. I've set it up exactly as s2Member has instructed.

Thanks for passing this along.
triple

[Cristián Lávaque]

Cool, thanks. I'll wait for Jason now.

[Jason Caldwell]

Happy New Year!!!
~ Thank you very much for the great questions.

1.) Using Dynamic Pricing and s2Members buttons, the CCBill signup form does not show currency conversion which is a typical and important part of the form. Is there a solution for this? This is a make it or break it for me. This can result in a huge sales difference.

s2Member uses and advanced method of integration with ccBill, which takes advantage of ccBill Dynamic Pricing. This makes it possible for you to have much more control over what you sell, and how you sell, using s2Member Button Shortcodes.

If you need to offer different prices at different currencies, you can accomplish this via the s2Member Shortcode attribute cc="USD" by default. I'm attaching a screenshot. You can also take a look in your Dashboard, under: s2Member -> ccBill Buttons -> Shortcode Attributes (Explained).

2.) By default, CCBill lets the customer create a Username and Password on their signup form. (They also handle Username and Password changes when employing this option if you didn't know.) s2Members instructions have me disable the CCBill Un/Pw fields and the customer creates them through a second email they receive after they receive the first CCBill "thank you for signing up" email. I don't like this idea of adding this extra step for customers. Can s2Member be set up so the CCBill UN/PW fields can be used?

User Management should be OFF inside your ccBill account. WordPress manages Users/Members for you, with the help of s2Member. I would suggest changing the wording in the default email template provided by ccBill, so that customers are not confused.

It's also possible to allow customers to register first on your site, and then let them pay for access to content at higher levels (i.e. registration before checkout). (click screenshot to enlarge)

[tripleaaadelay]

Mr. Jason Caldwell...lead developer and voice behind the tutorial videos! Thanks so much for chiming in and in such detail.

1.) I can understand your solution, but let's imagine I am offering a monthly membership, 3 options...

-$2.99 (three day trial)
-$14.99 (for 30 days, rebilled every month)
-$99.99 (for 1 year, rebilled every year)

To offer all 6 currencies, that means my "Membership Options Page" now has 18 join buttons on it.

CCBill's default form has currency options built in which seems preferable. Another advantage to using the CCBill currency options is "Regional Pricing" where they update the recommended ratios on a regular basis to reflect market fluctuations. There must be a way to use s2Member for Membership Management but use CCBills price controls right? Attaching images.





2.) Looking at your "Registration Before Checkout?" screencap, it seems you prefer a combined Checkout/Registration process. This only appears to be available with a PayPal Pro account, not with CCBill though, correct?

Is there really no way to do a combined Checkout/Registration process with CCBill?

If I have to pick from the other options, I will probably go with the default, un/pw creation after payment. I agree that registering first, then going back to the site to pay is the least desirable solution.

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks for the follow-up!

To offer all 6 currencies, that means my "Membership Options Page" now has 18 join buttons on it.

Right. Well, you might consider laying things out a differently. For instance, you might have an intermediate page on your site that asks them to choose their currency or country, and provide options for checkout, based on that criteria. Or, you could also build a tabbed interface, or a dynamic form system which integrates s2Member® checkout buttons in a more creative way. See also... variables in your Shortcode: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1604

s2Member® integration with ccBill is with Dynamic Pricing. Depending on how you look at it, this is either a great thing, or not such a great thing. Dynamic Pricing frees you from the default ccBill interface just a bit, and puts more control in your hands, in terms of how each checkout form is presented, and at what price and terms. At ccBill, see: http://www.ccbill.com/cs/manuals/CCBill ... ricing.pdf

However, you're correct, this renders things like currency selection on the ccBill side unusable. You'll need to deal with these things prior to introducing the checkout form itself, on your site.

2.) Looking at your "Registration Before Checkout?" screencap, it seems you prefer a combined Checkout/Registration process. This only appears to be available with a PayPal Pro account, not with CCBill though, correct?

Is there really no way to do a combined Checkout/Registration process with CCBill?

I'm sorry, but no. ccBill checkout occurs at ccBill.com, much like a Standard Button integration with PayPal. Payment Gateways like PayPal "Pro" and Authorize.Net integrate with s2Member Pro Forms, and this becomes possible to combine both registration and checkout into one step. ccBill does not currently offer a solution like this however.

With s2Member, the closest you can get to this with ccBill, is to have your customer register first (if you prefer this), and then upon logging in for the first time, you present them with a payment button to complete checkout. Upon returning from checkout, s2Member promotes them to a paid level of membership, instead of asking them to register (because they've already registered a user/pass).

All of that being said, ccBill does have an option to accept usernames/passwords during checkout (as you mentioned), but this is not how s2Member is integrated with ccBill in the current release. If you wanted to accomplish this, you would need to seek assistance from a freelancer to modify s2Member in ways that would allow for this type of integration (i.e. modify s2Member's ccBill handler to accept a username/password from ccBill, and create an account within WordPress automatically after checkout).

[ChuckNorris]

I share Triple's pain.

Dynamic Pricing with CCBill was an absolutely horrible solution. It's near useless and I'm completely switching billing providers because of it.

What you can't do with dynamic pricing:

1) Geo currency
2) Geo language
3) Cancel discounts
4) Loyalty discounts

Also have to voice complaint about the email after signup as well. Every single day I either get an email complaint about no user/pass or have to send out an email to someone who I see that joins and doesn't sign up. I realize there may be a short delay from signup time to notification or whatever, but I don't see any other ccbill paysites with this problem so I can only assume it's also related to dynamic pricing.

aMember Pro has the user enter their user/pass and ccbill manages it and they integrate that way - a lot better than s2Member.

As of now I'm testing out Zombaio (having to pay for an s2member mod ). Regarding currency conversion - CCBill screws you over with that. They'll take out 5.11% or more just as a fee to convert the currency and pay you out. In other words, if you charge 19.99 GBP, they'll charge the customer say $31.40 but pay you out $29.70 or something (depends on the current conversion rate). In other words, you don't get 19.99 GBP, you get whatever their conversion rate is - the 5.11% they charge YOU to convert YOUR money, which happens to be about 100 - 200% higher fee than most banks charge to convert currency.

I can't comment on my experience with Zombaio as it hasn't started yet but it looks promising. No reserve, starts at 9.9% opposed to CCBill's 14.5%, immediate cross sells (ccbill makes you wait forever to get approved for them, and you can't do cross sells with stupid dynamic pricing anyways).

Boo to CCBill and Boo to dynamic pricing.

[tripleaaadelay]

Chuck Norris doesn't call the wrong number, you answer the wrong phone....couldn't resist with a CK fact!

In my case we've not yet opened our doors to the public, but it looks like we're going to have to explore an alternate solution to s2Member. I really appreciate the help that Jason and Cristián has given here. I know that CCBill is only one small part of the overall plugin, but in our case the s2Member options for it are not adequate enough.

Chuck, you may want to rethink using Zombaio first. I've done a lot of research on the topic and decided to go with CCBill as our core simply because of the number of Affiliates that prefer it. If Affiliates matter, ask your potentials and then make a decision. For us, percentage differences will not make up for less Affiliates.

Phase 2 for us will be setting up Cascade billing from CCBill down Zombaio perhaps. First though, we need to get Membership working well with CCBill.

Good luck although I'm sure Chuck Norris doesn't need any.

triple

[ChuckNorris]

I too did a lot of research and ended up with CCBill and thus far, I'm really displeased. Their currency conversion fees are a joke, which makes my distaste with dynamic pricing & s2member somewhat obsolete now.

I went with them based primarily on that same reason (affiliates) and I've come to find out that's not really the case. CCBill is one of the largest (if not the largest) adult IPSP so naturally sites that use them are going to have affiliates that promote them using CCBill affiliate links.

If you have a site that can convert and put money in their pocket, they're not going to ignore you because you don't use CCBill. Either way, you can have your CCBill affiliate program and have users coming in from their links hit CCBill payment forms opposed to Zombaio or whoever.

If you go with CCBill you'll be paying at least 5 - 6% more in fees + a 6 month 5% reserve + ridiculous conversion fees for non-usd currency + $750 visa fee + $500 yearly fee.

I'm excited to test out Zombaio but if it doesn't pan out I'm definitely setting up with Epoch. Same fees, no reserve, way better payment forms. CCBill looks like it's stuck in 2005 and for as long as they've been in business, they don't provide conversion rates for their different form styling (sad).

According to Zombaio terms you can't put them in a cascade below any other processors and unless they're first in your billing cascade, it's grounds to terminate your account. Whether they enforce this or not I have no idea, but I saw it when reading their terms last week.

Good luck to you as well

[Jason Caldwell]

Thanks for the follow-ups regarding ccBill.
I feel everyone's pain with ccBill, and I do appreciate the feedback.