Okay, I have both estore and wpaffiliate and need to get it to all play nice with s2member. Should have just bought a bundle with emember from the get go I suppose, but its too late now, so let me explain what I have and what I need to do and hopefully someone will be able to make some recommendations for me :)
Currently my site offers digital graphics for unlimited access download to members (all handled w/s2member). Being high resolution graphics, I have moved everything over to Amazon s3 because no matter what I tried, Mac users for some reason couldn't download a lot of the files all at once when they were protected so only members could access them due to the server timing out.
In order to make sure that the amazon s3 link can't be hotlinked or shared with anyone too easily, I've set my bucket properties so that the links for the products only work when the link is on my site. This was an easy and free solution that works like a charm - I can't even download them from my Amazon account, lol. This to me seems like a much more secure option than using encrypted links, which could be shared within the expiration period. s2member limits how many ip addresses can login to a site in any given time so I think my stuff is pretty safe from the average person sharing files/account info :)
So, we now want to offer our products as individual files in addition to the membership. I am trying to figure out solutions to these issues:
1. Want to force customer to create a free account before they can check out. One solution I have for this would be to hide the PayPal button from them until they are logged in. To do this, I would need to probably create a custom shortcode for estore for showing the cart based on my s2member levels. Or, is there a better solution to force registration first that integrates naturally with estore?
2. Once member is logged in they will be able to checkout with PayPal...so when they go to PayPal we need to make sure that their order will show up associated to their account. What would be the way to do this? I am guessing we need to communicate something back to my site via IPN url? (I am very confused about how PayPal works, so if this makes no sense I apologize!) I am sure something needs to happen "behind the scenes" though. I am also using wp-affiliate, so wasn't sure if that would make a difference.
3. Need to make it so customer gets an email that does not show the product links, since the product links will not work in an email since it is not my site. Seems like the best solution for this is just editing the confirmation email that says "Thank you for your purchase! You may now login into your account here and access your order history to access your products".
4. Which brings up the subject of how do I set up an orders history page? I read this tutorial but it says you need both estore and emember:
http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-membership/how-to-display-a-members-purchase-history-158
Is emember necessary or would I need to create a new shortcode that instead intergrates the necessary info from s2member?
I apologize this is so long, I am going to keep exploring different options available - if anyone has any suggestions or can answer any of these questions I definitely appreciate it! If I make any progress I will update this thread.
