I am having a devil of a time getting straight answers. Am using vBulletin 3.6.8. PL2 and it says recurring billing not supported. But, the 2CO product descriptions make it very clear that ARBs are supported, at least by 2CO (and I might add I rather like most of what I see in the 2 CO description because it looks like I have to pass a minimum of three variables to the Plug and Play cart. So, is anyone using 2CO with vBulletin for recurring?

Also, can anyone tell me if 2CO can pass back to the vB php file for username or does the reassignment of user from one group (priviledges) to another have to be done manually?

Sure would appreciate some pointers and thank everyone in advance for at least reading this plea.

I wanted to mention a few suggestions for 2checkout to make their recurring billing more feasible.

1) There needs to be a way to locate or at the very least run a report on ALL recurring subscriptions that are not being billed for whatever reason – credit card didn’t go through, customer call 2checkout to cancel directly, called to request refund, etc. If you have a lot of recurring subscriptions, it’s impossible to keep track of this with 2checkout.

2) The only way of knowing whether a recurring payment does not go through for ANY reason is that an email is sent out – with a Sale # only. That email at the very least needs to have the product name in the email to let the vendor know what failed. The vendor should not have to login to check and search on a sale numbers to see what product did not bill. I have days where I get 20+ of these. For a $4.95/mo product, it’s not worth my time to login to do this. However, when you through in a failed or cancelled $650/mo product, that’s a big problem. If the email contained the product name, then I would be able to handle these higher ticket appropriately.

3) There needs to be a screen that shows every transaction – when a recurring product rebills, when one is cancelled, when a refund it issued and the date these things happen. Right now, the only way to know these even fail is to go to the ORIGINAL sale number (yep, if they ordered 2 years ago you have go back 2 years ago and find the original sale # to see if this even an active subscription any more). This ia absolutely insane and makes it impossible for accurate book keeping.

4) For higher volume accounts, it would be beneficial to have a dedicated account manager that takes these suggestions and gets them to the right people so something is implemented rather than having vendors post to this forum.

I thought it would be useful to provide a list of issues the 2checkout system has so that they can be fixed and other people can see these issues also.

1 – Cookies/session tracking does not work correctly, if a customer tries to by and item but does not complete the process and then tries to use the checkout again they often can not do this correctly without clearing their cookies and restarting their browser. I have noticed this myself and has numerous clients mention this.

2 – If you use a currency other than USD the admin system is very confusing as currencies are not clearly stated throughout the system.

3 – dates are displayed in many different formats throughout the admin system even on the same page dates will be displayed in many different formats

4 – the reoccurring billings implementation is very lacking in features at best. There is absolutely no way to tell how many new customers have signed up in any given period, the best you can get is a list of sales including all existing agreements.

5 – declined reoccurring sales are extremely difficult to track, as they will not always be displayed in the declined billings section.

6 – notification emails for reoccurring billings are completely unreliable sometimes you will get them sometimes you will not.

7 – Make sure you keep all of your own records as 2checkouts records are sketch at best.

If you only intend on doing a very small number of online billing then 2checkout will do you just fine. If you intend on making a reasonable number of online transactions do yourself a favour and go with a more reliable/reputable billing company you will be glad of it in the long run.