PayPal and Custom Integration

[StephenJ]

Greetings,

 

I like my first impression of the WHMCS product and I have a few questions regarding our key reasons for wanting to upgrade:

 

1. How does WHMCS handle upgrades for PayPal subscriptions? We've researched PayPal documentation pretty heavily and did not find a workable workflow that would allow us to prorate a subcription modification. So, upgrades have been difficult for us since we allow people to upgrade in the middle of a billing cycle. Our current method is to ask the user to cancel the existing subscription and create a new one. This works alright, but it gives some people heartburn and isn't particularly elegant. Does WHMCS handle this scenario in a more elegant manner?

 

2. I have a few thousand existing PayPal subscriptions. I have all of the IPN data in a table. What is the process for importing these subscriptions and users into WHMCS.

 

3. I would prefer for people to use the same password for WHMCS as they use for our site. We hash passwords using SHA1 and a long salt value. Is WHMCS compatible with this or are we going to need to do second account creations logins when they order?

 

4. Our product is not traditional web hosting, but mirrors it in many ways. We are more of an Application Service Provider. We have a free product that can then be upgraded to various other types of products. Because of this we have proprietary systems and processes to provision, suspend, and expire user's sites. How difficult is it to hook into the event flow in WHMCS to do this? Does WHMCS essentially have events for "Product Type X, Customer Y: Canceled" or what? I'm trying to get a feel for what under the hood we are going to need to do in order to provision our customers using our custom processes.

 

5. Can WHMCS handle the "order" of a completely free (Ad-Supported in our case) product that requires no billing to be done, that can then be upgraded to a paid product where PayPal subscriptions will occur.

 

6. At what user level does WHMCS start to have performance issues? I realize this question can be easily answered with "depends". However, I assume that this product is installed on enough modern and average hardware out there that people have general guidance. i.e. 100,000 is fine, 1,000,000 requires heavy DB optimization.

 

 

 

Thank you kindly for the feedback,

Stephen Johnston

[chickendippers]

1. PayPal subscriptions are not very flexible, that is why we encourage our customers to use other other gateway (WorldPay FuturePay). There is no way to change the subscription amount, so if the customer's package changes they will need to cancel the current subscription and create a new one.

 

2. PayPal do not allow you to modify the IPN data of an existing subscription. You will have to cancel all subscriptions and have every one recreated with the WHMCS callback.

 

3. Who knows what's possible with custom developments. By default WHMCS and products have individual logins.

 

4. You can create a custom module for your proprietary control panel and an API is available (http://v3manual.whmcs.com/). Best thing to do is to submit a ticket to discuss the details.