Subscriptions, ShoppingList, and recurring billing revisited

[Brett]

I know this topic has been brought up before.  I just wanted to
summarize my current understanding of the best practices to support
subscription services and recurring (monthly) billing.

Assumed recommendations and Questions

- Use ShoppingList services to execute monthly subscription billing
because the service is already used for doing "reorders".  The service
correctly handles orders and doesn't require us to duplicate the
implementation.  Let me know if that is correct.

- when should the subscription entity be used versus a normal product?

- Does the subscription. entity capture other attributes of a
subscription that couldn't be modeled in a product?


We have several projects that require a solid subscription solution.
We are working on them right now and would like to follow the ofbiz
recommendations.

Thanks in advance for your help.


Brett

[David E Jones]

I don't know... based on reading this my impression is that it would  
mostly depend on the requirements you're working with.

The first point, for example, includes the assertion "The service  
correctly handles orders and doesn't require us to duplicate the  
implementation." I'd say that depends a lot on what the user of the  
system needs.

In general there are general structures and logic in OFBiz, but I've  
found that given 10 different clients chances are you may very well  
have 10 different business processes and requirement sets for the  
details of how to handle recurring orders.

-David


On Apr 9, 2007, at 1:23 PM, Brett Palmer wrote:

> I know this topic has been brought up before.  I just wanted to
> summarize my current understanding of the best practices to support
> subscription services and recurring (monthly) billing.
>
> Assumed recommendations and Questions
>
> - Use ShoppingList services to execute monthly subscription billing
> because the service is already used for doing "reorders".  The service
> correctly handles orders and doesn't require us to duplicate the
> implementation.  Let me know if that is correct.
>
> - when should the subscription entity be used versus a normal product?
>
> - Does the subscription. entity capture other attributes of a
> subscription that couldn't be modeled in a product?
>
>
> We have several projects that require a solid subscription solution.
> We are working on them right now and would like to follow the ofbiz
> recommendations.
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
>
> Brett