Charging for recurring, periodic services

[Randy Moore <ramoore@axion-it.net>]

Hi All,

I'm trying to setup Minivend to charge for recurring monthly services.

I've come up with two basic approaches and I'd be interested in comments 
from the list on potential problems or better approaches.

For both approaches, I'll use Minivend to take orders and allow customers 
to add/delete/change recurring orders and their personal contact & billing 
info.  The items ordered on a recurring basis will be stored in a special 
Minivend database.

The approach I'd like to use is to create a special minivend page that:
	Reads the recurring orders database
	Loops through the orders
		filling in a cart for each order
		filling in the customer info, name, addr, cc#, etc.
		Process each order   <-- This is the part I'm not sure about
	Go to next order

But, I'm not sure if I can "submit" the order for processing from an 
embedded Perl script.  I'm pretty sure I can setup all the other needed 
variables.

Any suggestions on how to submit an order for processing without clicking 
on a form???

I'd "trigger" this page from a cron process using GET from the LWP package.

The other approach I'm considering is to do the real work in an external 
Perl script (also called from cron).  It would use the LWP modules to call 
a series of special (simplified) Minivend pages to submit the orders for 
each customer.

This script would cause Minivend to dump to text the Userdb and Ordersdb, 
then parse these text files to build a list of orders to place.  For each 
order it would:
	Fill in a Login Form and submit it
	Fill in an Order Form and submit it (possibly multiple times)
	Fill in a Checkout page and submit it
	Fill in a Logout Form and submit it.

I'm sure I can get this method working, but I think that it will be tougher 
to detect and handle errors this way, it will also probably be slower.

Am I likely to have problems with Cookies if I use this method?

Comments about any of the above would be greatly appreciated.  I'm an not 
an expert with either Minivend or the LWP modules for Perl, but I should be 
able to struggle through with both.

BTW, for credit card security, I'm keeping ONLY the PGP encrypted version 
of the credit card number stored in the UserDB, but I've added a routine to 
decrypt them when needed.  I've also changed the DB type for the Userdb 
from TAB to LINES w/NOTES so that the encrypted version of the CC info does 
not get cut off when I export the Userdb to text.

Thanks.
Randy Moore
Axion Information Technologies, Inc.

email     ramoore@axion-it.net
phone   301-408-1200
fax        301-445-3947