Anyone tried PayKickStart with S2Member? Need a better solution for checkout

[mfussell (Matt Fussell)]

Due to the recent shortcomings of S2Member and PayPal, I’m looking into a better solution for the checkout process. I realize that I could switch to a different plugin, but this is scary for me. I have over 24,000 members with over 1000 pages of coded pages with different membership levels, ccaps, and so on. PayKickStart states that it integrates with S2Member although I am wary. I’m not sure how it would handle cancellations and most importantly, how it would send folks back to the site after purchase. Does anyone have any experience using PayKickStart with S2Member?

I really like S2Member. I’ve been using it since 2012. I wish there was someway to simply improve the checkout process, but keep the S2 functionality for protecting pages and content. The way the pop up works for Stripe is confusing to people and unusual, which makes people abandon making payments.

I’m very willing to pay a developer to help. I can handle all of the front end design, but it’s the backend development where I lack the skills. I don’t want to disturb the recurring payments that members are currently paying. Anyone have any thoughts, as I’m sure others are now actively looking into other solutions?

[KTS915 (Tim Kaye)]

Building a better version of the Stripe functionality is dead easy for any developer. I have done it for my own sites, without using the pop-up, and it works very well. I don’t have time to do this for you, but I suggest you ask @krumch.

[openmtbmap (Felix Hartmann)]

Hi Matt,

I guess it works - but 99% sure it cannot set EOT. Right now only ThriveCart can set EOT AFAIK. You could try to convince them to support s2member (as they already support optimizemember which is an s2member fork)
Or you also move to Optimizemember. Switching is pretty painless - once someone can explain me how to redirect the IPN (should be easy - I’m just too stupid to get the nginx redirect right):

Redirect Paypal IPN (nginx best)

Hi - I seem to be too stupid to understand how to redirect the paypal IPN - please help me if you know. Should be interesting soon for others too as s2member is dying - and even folllow up plugins will likely due to copyright need to use a different handler. This is not working. location / { rewrite ^/?s2member_paypal_notify=1 ^/?optimizemember_paypal_notify=1 redirect; rewrite ^/?s2member_pro_stripe_notify=1 ^/?optimizemember_pro_stripe_notify=1 redirect; try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$a…

Move from s2member to Optimizemember

Some more things to adapt --- hunt through all of your plugins and mu-plugins to change s2member to optimizemember (best open all files at the same time where there could be things - so you don't have to do this again and again - watch out that you always get the case right. s2member and the CASE is simply rubbish - sadly optimizemember did simply copy over the case sensivity. Also I think you best forward domain.com/?s2member_pro_stripe_notify=1 to domain.com/?optimizemember_pro_stripe_noti…

I did move my first site with 8000 members - if the remaining bugs are sorted I will move my main site too.

Note that neither s2member nor optimizemember supports extending time via remote API yet. And remote API also does not support to read out the EOT. So for users with say more than 7 days left (you could filter them out from active users) - you cannot offer extensions via Thrivecart.

[mfussell (Matt Fussell)]

Thanks for this info. I did reach out to ThriveCart. They said that if enough people requested S2Member support, then they would add it. It would be nice if they did. I’d go with them for sure. I love the way S2Member protects content, but have always hated the way they make it hard for people to checkout.

Good luck with the switch over to OptimizeMember. I may have to do this myself, if S2Member is indeed dying. I’m hoping it doesn’t though.

[openmtbmap (Felix Hartmann)]

well most of it is identical - except that they have quite good support. But let’s see how they react once I find the logs with errors from Paypal/Stripe - s2member never cared.
If you/we find out how to return the IPN correctly - it is like a 90-120min worktime/downtime to switch over. Maybe (I’m not sure here yet) you will need to logout everyone (I’ve set the login cookie to 1year - so usually members are logged in) - some report right now about broken protected pages - but most users are fine - so I have not found the culprit yet (or I messed up a link in the conversion - so many that it’s hard to manually look at all).