Not having the ability for members to opt in or opt out of recurring payments can be an issue for the organization. Membership is always an option for any organization and having a system that once activated there is no indication for the ultimate end user, the member, to self direct their involvement can lead to bitterness and distrust. I have had to deal with a similar situation using PayPal and not knowing that the membership payments would be recurring and some members did resent the lack of option and knowledge.
Tech support's suggestion of having alternate level options for recurring and non recurring is a bandaid at best. Add the lack of ability to have recurring donations and there was little reason for my organization to choose Wild Apricot/Affinipay as our credit card processor.
I want to understand the reasoning for not having an opt in/opt out radio button when initiating and renewing memberships and why no ability to have recurring donations. Both would be very helpful for your clients with memberships and fundraising. If someone could respond to kelly@ncsfreedom.org with the company's reasoning, it is apparently this way with all payment options.

Thank you;
Kelly Beaton

I would like to be able to allow members to register for events using "credits".

These credits could be earned or purchased from the store in bulk.

It would help if users could buy credits in bulk so that the $0.30 fee per transaction would not impact as much users that want to register for multiple events at a time. They could just purchase a credit bundle and use the credits to enter as many events as they desire.

"Credit" names should be customizable for every organizations purposes. (i.e. "puppy points" if you have a dog related organization your members would purchase "puppy points".

The point is, if possible don't just call them credits let the name be customizable.

Thanks

Great that FINALLY implemented! I notice the last four digits of their credit card is now displaying in their member profile as they renew. This is very helpful; Can we also display with that the expiration date?

In regards to sending a notice 2 weeks in advance and when their credit card fails. People nowadays get so many emails I don't think that once notice two weeks in advance is enough. Could we think about a second notice maybe a week in advance for those who haven't acted on the first notice?

When they get those notices and/or when they change their credit card information could the admin have the option to be notified of same? (Eventually a separate recurring payments dashboard might be something to think about for admin to at a glance see the status of recurring payments, who is about to fail, whether they have received notifications, opened their notifications and responded etc.) Thx.

Our members love being able to pay their membership dues by credit card. However, our biggest gripe with the payment systems that apricot supports is that there doesn't appear to be a way to give the credit card processing fee to the member, rather than our company. Since our membership costs are very high ($36,750), these small (~ 3.5%) fees really cost us a lot of money ($1,286.25), and it would be very helpful if we could pass these fees back on to the member.

For example, if there was a way to allow members to manually enter in the amount they want to pay by credit card (including the 3.5% fee), rather than automatically having to pay the full invoice amount (less the 3.5% fee). I know Intuit QuickBooks allows the members to add the fee to their payment, but Apricot doesn't support intuit quickbooks online payments.

Good morning!

Please I'm coming to you for the issue in subject, to plead.

Our website (eduriche.com) is ready since months but, we cannot use it, just because we are in Africa. I mean the payment gateways currently available on WA global system are all good, but are also all global without Africa and especially without Cameroon, my fantastic country. It is very hard to swallow the reason why thier idea of globalization can exclude a whole continent, with unimaginable potentials and so highly brain gifted like Africa. Why are all these frustration for? They all refuse to deal with us for this following simple and basic reason: Eric, you are in Africa. I have a verified merchant account at Paypal.com with the name of our legaly registered organization but, PayPal says we can use its system only to buy, and not to sell because we are in Africa. Who can keep spending money and get rich without income? Beeing in Africa is not a reason to banished!

So, I’ve been working hard to find a gateway among to listed ones on WA but, in vain. And I then engaged myself in deep researches among tens of millions of websites. And many (almost all) of them are not ready to deal with Africa. I’ve even been asked in advice by many of them to base my Organization in USA, Canada, EU, or to let them rebuild my website, just to get my business accepted for cards processing. But personnaly, I don't see why should I be forced to do so. If WA after doing it's best cannot allow us to accept card on our site by giving us a true global payment gateway, we'll finaly set registration free of charge for all our members. The doors of money may be closed, but the doors of Love is always opened. And that is our site's topic.

But I have something I thing serious for all Africa that I wanted to submit to your appreciation, the way I did to WA's support and tech staff. I think, knowing that I may be wrong, it is a good payment gateway: http://www.dalpay.com .

With fast approval, they accept business from almost every country in the world, including Africa (where they have Ghana and Nigeria blocked for some time) without set up fees, no mothly fees but with comprehensive rates. I humbly think that if WA installs dalpay.com as one of payment gateway our online membership software we all share can be really globally used, because Africa-based and Asia-based Organizations will now have a true opportunity to use it fully to improve and to help. We also have many great and positive things to share with the world! We then need a geteway!

You (WA) once introduce Cameroon in your list of countries just to give to our organization the chance to have a high quality website: this was just after I wrote a short request. I then understood that you were self-committed to help. Please keep helping us as far as you can, until satisfaction, if possible. Please set Dalpay for us, forsaken people.

Best regards

From Yaounde in Cameroon,

Eric Langoul

E-Way is an EXTREMELY competitive payment gateway that allows multiple currency purchases, NEXT day payment into your account and takes recurring payments (what you need for memberships).

PayPal is our only option at present - it's unreliable and expensive amongst other things.

http://www.eway.com.au

I don't want to use PayPal - and I want to use WA - as a customer, you know what your business needs and being dictated to about suppliers/gateways you can use seems strange and out of step with the rest of the WA system - WA seems to have been designed to work flexibly for so many different types of businesses.

I look forward to having some better southern hemisphere billing choices in the near future.

(Re-posted and edited from post below)

We have 2 organizations, one that manages the membership and the other our tax-deductible contributions. As such we have 2 different bank accounts and therefore need 2 different payment gateways. We're signed up with authorize.net, however there's only one global setting in WA for online payments. If it were possible to choose a payment method, for instance one for membership and another for donations, that solve the problem of having to set up 2 WA accounts.

For now I've set up 2 accounts and am working with the widgets. This is a good work-around, however the members will need to fill out 2 different profiles and they can't view all the information in their accounts at once.

Update: The donation form widget sort of works from one WA account to another. However, the event widget works perfectly! I set up our sponsorships as events and pasted the code into the main site. It looks great.