Hi Clintbaptiste, You do not need eStore (it helps and makes the accepting payment side of things easier if you do but it’s not a must).
with that said, you can have a plain PayPal “Subscription” or “Buy Now” button to do the job for you. There are two parts to accepting payment for any membership:
1) A payment button (eg. a “Subscribe” button) that the visitor can use to pay you money.
2) A script that does the post-payment processing (eg. create appropriate membership account for the visitor who just paid for the membership).
Step 1 is really simple (you just get the button code from PayPal and embed it on a page). Some people choose to do step 2 manually (I don’t really like this). How do you automate step 2? The answer is PayPal’s IPN (Instant payment notification) feature. The following link explains the IPN feature in details:
You may already have an IPN handling script that some other post-payment stuff for you. In this case I can give you a bit of code that you just add to your existing IPN handling feature to automate step 2.
If you don’t have any IPN handling script then I can give you a fresh one that you just put on your server and it’s done.
Let me know if this makes sense.