about subscription payments.
any news on this?
One of the Devs said sometime ago about needing to provide documentation on how to extend the subscription service.
Can't see it happening for a while.
There's already more than one subscription handler in the repository that is yet to be released (and Google Checkout isn't even on that list but I can't remember what else is), so it's possible that it'll be a while.
Does Google Checkout support something similar to PayPal IPN for notifying a site of payments?
Quote from: Arantor on January 21, 2012, 07:06:16 PM
Can't see it happening for a while.
There's already more than one subscription handler in the repository that is yet to be released (and Google Checkout isn't even on that list but I can't remember what else is), so it's possible that it'll be a while.
Does Google Checkout support something similar to PayPal IPN for notifying a site of payments?
It seems they do https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/checkout-merchant/integration-troubleshooting/mfcEes7QY5o (https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/checkout-merchant/integration-troubleshooting/mfcEes7QY5o)
Hmm, looks like it's a fair bit different to what PayPal's does so that may adverse affect how it can be implemented - it may require far more than a drop-in script as the subs system was supposed to be.
I did some research on this for another script I was going to write.
Google Checkout is missing a few key features.
One of them is a true subscriptions system. They appear to have one but its still very unclear on how to use it and not an easy to toggle between a subscription and a regular payment.
The second happens to be a IPN feature. Far as I can tell google will not send back a request to a secret url once it has completed the payment. So this basically leaves the code on our side up to wasting resources to continue to check that the payment came through or something. We cant' rely on the user clicking the correct continue/return url as if they don't then SMFs subscription system will never know. I suppose some hackery could be done to allow us to force a check. But again wasting resources on something that if Google implanted would make it so much easier to handle things like this.
I don't think using any of their advanced shopping cart features or things like XML/HTML API requests should need to be done.
I heard the support for them is not that great from Google and would be worried if they drop the product.
Haven't seen any major advantages for using them.