Easy subscription modification

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Some developers have asked me about giving their customers basic selection of the sort of subscription they want, much like the choices given by magazines and newspapers. It is often something like six months, yearly or three year subscriptions, of course with discounts for the longer times.

What I am showing here is a range of subscription possibilities that you may select from. I provide a dropdown with many options, but you may only want several in your site - it doesn't really make any sense to have a daily billing for really cheap items (0.35/day and PayPal gets it all!)

What is being shown is the method to allow the customer to make subscription selections without having multiple buttons and FORMs in your site. Let the customer pick what he wants, and he gets it - all with a single dropdown.

To see what is happening you must look at the value fields of the select that allows the different options. The format is a list of five, comma separated, items that describe the options being selected. The format of that comma-separated list is...

    value="t3,p3,a3,src,sra"

      where
        t3  = (D)ay, (W)eek, (M)onth or (Y)ear.
        p3  = cycle (how many t3 items in period).
        a3  = amount per t3 time.
        src = 1 (recurring), 0 (one-time)
        sra = 1 means try 3 times to renew, 0 means cancel NOW.

      So, "m,3,10,0,0" means monthly for 3 months (quarterly),
                       10.00 per month, one-time, no retries.
                       You get billed 30.00 every quarter.

      (consult the Subscription Manual for definitions of those items)

Once you understand the format of that value field, you can build whatever sort of subscription you want. Even expand it into trail subscriptions (which I may do later in a 2nd FORM example.)

We start with the output of the PayPal subscription button factory and make a few changes. Then the JS processes the FORM and adjusts the fields. Right-click on this page (and <view source>) to see what was done.

Copy the JS from this example and paste it into your page just after the <body>, like is done on this page.
Go into every FORM that can place an order and add these things...
- A new named element called basedes to hold the base description of this item.
- An onclick event handler to the "select" button, and an onsubmit event handler to the FORM element as is done on this page. This is how the parameters get set for the user selection.

Basic recurring subscription - no trials.

Contact me concerning this article at paypalhelper@aol.com. Mention "subscriptions" in your note.

Individual help starting at $25.00 for simple JS solutions.