Tutorial about plans and shopping carts?

[cpugrud]

I'm running a test of the trial version in preparation for purchase and roll out of a private WISP. Unless I'm really missing something, the documentation provided as extremely thin for plans and shopping carts.

What I want to provide (and have running correctly day 1) is:
1. Self signup
2. Purchase of a monthly plan that will expire and send back to purchase again next month.
3. MAC lock for passive access (all of my users live in range of the WiFi).

I'm feeling a bit dense, but I can't quite figure the interaction between plans and carts and all of the options after staring at the example and searching the forum for several hours.

4. I really need to be able to manually credit users who have already/will pay me in cash, rather than paypal.
5. Would it be possible to allow a user to access from both a laptop and a PS3 using the same account (2 MAC addresses)?

Thank you for your support in advance. I have to know that the software will work right the first time before I roll it out, which means I really need to get it configured correctly first.

[alan]

First, note that Plan is just a template of username attributes that you can apply to different situations (e.g. self sign-up, shopping carts).

To answer you questions:
1) That should be pretty straightforward. If you want specific initial attributes for the self sign-up users, you can specify self sign-up Plan (under Authentication Server)

2) Currently, you cannot do this with our PayPal module directly. The closest thing is that you need to define a Shopping Carts Plan for each month (e.g. Sep-09), and let user purchase the specific Plan. Note that this Plan is different than the self sign-up Plan above.

3) Not too sure exactly what your requirements. Is the user attribute "Bind to first login MAC address" suitable for you?

4) Yes. You can definitely do that. You just go to Configuration Manager -> Users and edit the "Conditions to suspend this account:At a specific date and time"

5) Yes. This is the default behavior (unless you specify "Bind to first login MAC address" attribute)
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[cpugrud]

For 1 and 2 I think I understand how to better explain what I desire.

I would prefer that users self sign up. When a new user signs up, they should have no access until they pay. I can see that this is part of the default behavior.

When users have no access, it takes them directly to the shopping cart. The shopping cart needs to offer a monthly (which can be 30 days) plan for sale. After the paypal transaction completes, the user should get a month (or 30 days) of access.

At the end of the month or 30 days the user should be suspended until they go back and purchase another month/30day subscription.

The only other thing that would be nice is the ability to also offer a 1 day/24 hour subscription.

[alan]

Currently, our credit card module doesn't support the concept of monthly access. Instead, you can top up access minutes or data transfer quota. Note that "monthly access" counts the calender days while "access minutes" only counts when user is logged in.

Alternatively, you can skip our credit card module modify the user attribute "expiry time" directly using our FirstSpot API "update_usr_attributes". Refer to chapter 10 of firstspot_guide.pdf for details.
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[cpugrud]

If I set the access for 30 days, how will that work?

[UKEcommerce]

Can you please explain more as i want to do the same thing to my website shopping cart.
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[alan]

What is your exact requirement? So you want to setup your Shopping Cart based on what criteria (e.g. access minutes, data transfer quota)?
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[ryanslimmon]

Not sure if you guys got your issues sorted out or not. As a Firstspot user, it was difficult for me to get my head around the software at first. Let me see if I can help you out.

But basically we do the same. We offer a daily/weekly/monthly packages through our hotspot. What this means is when they purchase the daily, they have access for 1 day from the time of purchase. Weekly = 7 days, and monthly is 30 days. No matter how much or how little they use it, the time expires after 1/7/30 days.

Now how this relates to "Plans" and "Shopping Cart" is this.

Plan - This is how you want to control their internet access.
Ex: for our Daily option, I set the Name and under "Conditions to suspend this account", I use the bottom option and set it for "After 1 Day(s)". I've left all the other options alone as they really don't apply (to me).

Shopping Cart - Now this is where you set your price.
So you create your item description, for simplicity sake, I use the same name as my plan - "Daily". Then you set your price. Next for the "Based on Plan", set that to your plan you want it to use (in my case "Daily").
Now what this means is when the users purchases something with this option, it adds one day (24 hours) from time of purchase to the Users account. You can see this under:
Users Page -> (select your user)
Under "Conditions to suspend this account", the option "At a specific Date and time", you should see it now set to 24 hours after you purchase date and time.

So you have to create a separate Shopping Cart and a Plan. Now the reasoning behind this is you can use a "Plan" for more then a shopping cart. Althought, I suspect that the Shopping Cart is the most used.


User Self Sign up and No Internet Access:
To do this, this is what I did:
Created a new plan called "SignupDefault".
Under Conditions to suspend this account, i set "At a specific date and time" option to 01-01-2000 00:00

Then under the "Authentication Server" page, if you go down, there's an option for "Self Sign-up Plan". This is where you set your SignupDefault plan. Since that plan is set to expire the account in the on 01/01/2000, when the account is created it no longer has any minutes and gets redirected to the shopping cart.


Does that make sense for you?

[deherb3185]

Hello,

Does the firstspot allow us to accept both paypal and credit card at the same time in the shopping cart. So that the user can self signup and select to pay be credit card or by paypal or scratch card.

[alan]

Well, PayPal itself should accept credit card without the need to have a PayPal account.

Note that the current FirstSpot model is that the client needs to login to FirstSpot first before making PayPal/credit card purchase.
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[deherb3185]

Are you saying that if I configure only the paypal gateway in firstspot that users can use a creditcard to pay as well as their paypal account? Or do I have to configure the authorize.net gateway to accept credit cards?

[alan]

Yes, you should only need to setup PayPal as the gateway. Note that you need to set "PayPal Account Optional" to On (under PayPal -> My Account -> Profile -> Selling Preferences -> Website Payment Preferences)
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[deherb3185]

Thank you very much. I will try this out in the sandbox.