<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB">I am considering using BV Commerce to sell products that will be purchased either per item, or by paying a monthly subscription fee. The precise details are not yet decided, but there may also be a third option where you pay a monthly fee as well as a charge per item.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

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<SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB">Can anyone give me some advice as to if this could be achieved using BV Commerce, and if so what would be involved?

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Thanks for your reply Marcus.

I understand that it is not part of standard BVC, but how would you recommend modifying BVC to handle this? Would I need to modify the core source (with the developer pack) or use an add on or what?

How would it work if we used the recurring options provided by the credit card processors you refer to? Would there be a way of integrating that so that our BVC site would know if someone was paid up?

Thanks again for your reply Marcus.

We can write our own payment processor to handle the recurring payments and record who is and isn't paid up, either to a seperate database or using the BV Commerce database. My main concern is how I would integrate the payment details with BV Commerce. Let me explain a little more about what we are trying to achieve:

Rather than selling physical items, we are selling data, that will be made available to "paid up" users, or on a pay per download basis, although levels of subscription would be variable. So for example people who subscribe monthly on a "Gold" level would be able to download as much data as they want whenever they want. People on a "Silver" level would be able to download data say 20 times per month, but would then need to pay an additional charge per item if they required any more in any month. People on a "Bronze" level would get 10 per month free, and then additional ones at an additional cost per item (not necessarily at the same rate as Silver users), and finally, non-members would only be able to purchase data on a per item basis, at a higher rate than Silver or Bronze users.

I have been told that this should be possible, by somone who has used previous version of BVC. When I spoke to them they said we would probably want to set it up with a number of products, one for each level of membership, to account for the different prices. My concern is that this does seem to be pushing what BV Commerce is designed for, and so I just want to get straight in my head how this could be achieved, before we go any further

Any further advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated.