Good Simple Subscription/Installment Payments System

November 20, 2014 1:22 PM

My club is looking for an inexpensive way to automate monthly dues payments by credit/debit card.

We are not looking for something that our members would sign up for and configure themselves. Rather, we would like to take their credit/debit card information and be able to set up automatic monthly payments in a certain amount to be charged on a certain day of each month. Because we don't operate year-round, we would also like to be able to specify automatic start and stop dates when we set up each payee. And finally, it would be great if the system could generate either confirmation emails to out Treasurer every time a payment was taken (e.g., John Doe September Dues, Steve Smith September Dues, etc.) or, better yet, would either automatically or manually generate a monthly report showing a list of every member who had paid through this system.

We currently use Stripe and EventEspresso to take payments on our WP web site, and Square to take payments by physical card swipe or manual entry. So technologies that might use one of these systems are just fine.

posted by slkinsey to Technology (3 answers total)

Response by poster: For the purposes of this discussion, let's assume that the transaction costs are born by the payers. Not to threadsit, but a big part of the reason we want to do this is that for many of our members it is easier to pay, say, fifty-five bucks a month for eight months than four hundred bucks all at once. More to the point, some amount of transaction and administrative fees is worth it to us if the club can be paid automatically and we can avoid having to chase our members for payment.
posted by slkinsey at 1:57 PM on November 20, 2014

I (and 2,229 other Mefites) use Paypal for monthly support of Metafilter. It's a tiny bit clunky, but it works and you don't have to do anything hard on your end to get it to work. Indeed, people figured out how to do monthly Paypal payments before Matt even realized it was a thing.
posted by rockindata at 2:42 PM on November 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

Having read your entire question, since you are already using Wordpress, why not use one of the membership plugins , like this one
posted by rockindata at 2:48 PM on November 20, 2014