I am about to launch a membership site and would like to have some suggestions and advice on how to set it up properly, from the start. My plan is to setup up the site and use the software that PayPal provides, to deal with the user/passwords and the recurring payments, since it looks rather easy. Is that a solid plan or do you recommending another processor or to use a membership script of some sort?
I use PayPal to handle both one-off and recurring subscription payments. Their API is fairly well documented and not difficult to work with. PayPal offer a sandbox version of the site (sign up here) where you can make as many transactions as you like with mock money to test your system. Depending on how your pricing is set up, you can either create static payment forms using the button creator provided by PayPal or you can generate your own on the fly. I generate a payment form that sends the user to PayPal with the transaction information already encrypted. After a transaction is complete, I use PayPal's Instant Payment Notification system to perform whatever action is necessary on the user's account. The IPN sends a lot of useful information and you should make a point of recording it. PayPal provides more than one way to handle things, but this works very well for me.
Theoretically it sound working but in the long run you will face some problem with paypal for example the charge back and the fee etc. Normally for this kind of site,i prefer to use a third party service such as payloadz etc that make it work more better.But the only downside of it is the fee need to pay to the third party service provider