Organizational Suggestions

[Magus]

Hi folks

Okay, some background first. I purchased eStore and eMember. So far I’ve only used eStore to sell digital goods via my site. Working wonderfully now! Thanks!

So, in planning my expansion I’d like some suggestions.

So far I’ve been using Pages for the eStore. I have pages that describe each product and the pages have an Add to Cart link. So moving forward I’m assuming I’ll just add more pages, configure products and off I go. Pretty straightforward, but I’m wondering if it will become unwieldy once my list of products expands beyond a certain point.

So here’s where it gets kind of off. And I’m assuming that here is also where the eMember will likely come into play.

I’m hopefully going to be offering video based training soon. My plan is to create hundreds of video lessons that will be offered. I’d like to offer the following:

Complete training on a product:

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This would allow access to all the lessons for a product but I’ll have different products, so the lessons would need to be grouped separately. So it may be helpful to think in terms of say, cooking. So here is how to prepare Fish and Chips from buying the fish to serving the meal. And perhaps I have another product where folks learn how to build a garage from finding the location to locking the door after it’s built. Perhaps as many as 100 videos or more for each product.

A group of related lessons

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Maybe the consumer already knows how the buy the fish and how to serve it, but they want only a group of lessons about how to cook fish using a Gas grill.

Individual lesson

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Perhaps someone only wants to see the video on how best to arrange the fish on the plate. I’m guessing this would be something one would use the “Pay per view”. Just view an individual lesson on one aspect.

If I were doing this in HTML, I’d be creating a frameset and populating the left frame with navigation links. The right frame would present pages where each page would present an individual video clip. Where I find myself scratching my head is in how best to approach this using the WordPress platform. So I turn to those of you that may have already been down this road to suggest approaches!

advTHANKSance for all suggestions! Rick

[amin007]

I am not the best person to advise on this as I follow a slightly different approach for membership sites. I like to create a few different membership levels and then a member who signs up for that level gets access to everything that the level offers. I refrain from selling individual items or videos with a membership site (it’s best to use an e-commerce plugin to sell an individual item in my opinion).

Anyway, you can potentially use eMember for your group of lessons and eStore’ pay per view option for individual videos.

[Magus]

Thanks for the info Amin!

I’ve been thinking about it and I see your point with the individual items. So how exactly does the pay per view thing work? I know with the digital downloads, the purchaser receives an obfuscated link. Would PPV work in a similar manner? Would I just point to the raw video someplace? Or would I first need to create either a post or a page in WordPress, insert the video on the post or page, then link to that somehow?

I’m guessing for the complete series of lessons, I might have a membership level that grants access to a group of pages or posts. Then for the smaller grouping, I’d have another membership level that would apply to another group of pages or posts.

Trying to sort the best approach before building the pages/posts or whatever.

Cheers… Rick

[wpCommerce]

For pay per view, you need to first create a post or page and embed the video on it. Now go to “Add/edit Product” of eStore and create a product for that video ( while creating a product uncheck the “downloadable” option, check the “Pay per view content” option under the “digital content details” and specify the URL of the video page in the “Digital product URL” field. This way the plugin will know that its a pay per view content). Now when anyone purchases the video he/she will be redirected to the page where the video is embedded but the actual URL of the page won’t be shown the user (eStore will show a masked URL to the user). This is to prevent the user from copying the actual URL and viewing the video later.

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