Premium Accounts

[onaseef]

• Fully internationalize the product: #208
• Additional customization of the mobile site: #209
• Add the functionality to support custom domains: #193
• Add a shopping cart and payment system that ties into WePay: #213
• Add a "Payment" widget: #214
• Add a premium account feature. It would be great if we could integrate the premium account feature into the system, so we could automatically keep track of who has a premium account and who doesn't and adjust the features accordingly.

[gilbert]

I'm splitting these up into multiple issues for discussion.

[gilbert]

Online payments have come a long way since we started working on YoMobi. Adding a premium account feature would be relatively easy now using Stripe. How exactly do you want premium stuff to work? As I mentioned elsewhere, the main thing to consider is the ownership transfer of mobile sites.

[onaseef]

The payment would be tied to the URL. So for each URL, the user would be able to have a premium account. The way I had envisioned it now was that we'd set up a paypal account and that one of the pieces of information the user would enter is the URL they are paying for. Then paypal would send us invoices and we'd manually set the checkbox for the URL to "premium". What's nice about paypal is that it offers recurring payments and various payment options.

I'd have to investigate stripe to see how it would integrate. The methodology would be the same though. The payment is tied the URL. Site ownership transfer shouldn't be an issue. Anyone should be able to pay to make any site premium, even if they aren't the site owner. If they are a collaborator on the site, they could make it premium. If the site ownership transfers and the person is no longer a collaborator, so long as the payment comes through for the URL, it will remain premium. If they stop paying it goes back to standard.

[onaseef]

Users will have the following payment options:

• 1 month
• monthly recurring
• 1 year

[gilbert]

This will take up to 6 hours.

[gilbert]

I'm working on the backend to this now. I haven't taken the UI into estimate. Do you have a mockup of the payments UI? I remember us talking about tabs in the account settings page, and sidebar links to site statuses and payment histories.

[onaseef]

I haven't created a mockup yet, however I will work on one.

The tabs will appear in the Account Settings view.

On the left, we'd have a vertical tab bar with the links:

Change Password Update Contact Information Upgrade Account Merchant Account

This means we'll break up the current Account Settings page into 2 pages. One where they can change their password, and one where they updated their contact information.

The Upgrade Account tab will let users pick between the Standard and Professional accounts. We aren't using the term premium or advanced. We want to convey value and functionality, rather than lesser and greater.

The Merchant Account tab lets the user create the WePay merchant account that ties into the Payment Widget and the Shopping Cart feature.

Please let me know what questions you have.

[gilbert]

I'm hesitant to use the word "account" since that usually refers to your entire account. We're still doing payments by site, correct?

[onaseef]

You are correct. The terms would be:

Standard Site Professional Site

A single account can have multiple types of sites.

[gilbert]

Ok, I've added basic payments with a basic ui. Right now all it does is make a site premium (in our language, it'll still be called "professional") when yomobi receives a payment notification from wepay. I still need to do:

• When a user pays for a site that is already premium, it should add time on top of the existing expire date.
• A script that runs daily and downgrades sites that are X number of days expired

I might be missing some other things too.

[gilbert]

Forgot to mention, it's on branch premium. It requires a rake db:migrate and a server restart.

[onaseef]

After seeing the interface, I realize all of the information should be in the site manager section, not Manage Accounts.

I believe this is correct: Each site would have to be set as standard or professional, which means the payements would be take individually for each account, and for the shopping cart to work, each site would have to have an associated merchant account to accept the payments. What do you think?

Here are the UI links:

UI: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2qHfsz2HClsMVZVclVURnRUUHFnT05rN3R3eElpdw Annotated UI: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2qHfsz2HClsSzZOd2JsWXNTdGFKRWFfY2llMTRzUQ

For a live example of how it should work, check out facebook's edit pages.

[gilbert]

1. Will the site upgrade be in a dialog?
2. What is the merchant account setup flow going to look like? What does the manage button do?

[onaseef]

1. If you check out the 2nd link (Annotated UI), it explains all the changes.
2. Clicking on the upgrade button expands that section to show the site upgrade option, which is basically just a payment taking system with the 2 options: $5 recurring monthly, $50 recurring annually.
3. The manage button lets them manage their current merchant account, like update their contact information or pay-to information.
4. I'll have to look at how Wepay handles setting up accounts for others, however, I imagine the flow is that the user sees a form that they fill out to set up an account. Once the account is verified, the user can use the mobile commerce components.

[gilbert]

Oh that's right, I was confusing your annotations with facebook's payment dialog.

[onaseef]

[Comment moved to #213]