Paid membership – annual or monthly setup with price freeze for first 1500

[karencheah]

I am in the midst of setting up paid membership using eMember. So far free membership is working well. We are using the process whereby all members will have to register for the free membership before upgrading to premium.

For the paid membership, we would like to offer payment either annually or monthly (via Paypal). We would also like to offer a lifetime guarantee for the first 1500 members who upgrade to premium, i.e., they will always pay the same fees even if price increases. Then for the subsequent premium members, they will have to pay whatever current membership price on renewal.

From my understanding, we will need 2 different Paypal buttons for annual and monthly payment, using Subscription Type button. After 1500 premium members have been reached, we will switch over to Buy Now type button. Is this the way to do it? Can we do this with just a single premium membership level or do we have to create multiple levels? They are all the same as far as access to content is concerned, just different payment details.

Is there a way to keep track of the number of premium members or do we have to do it manually so we can switch over the Paypal button? What is the renewal process for the first 1500 using the Subscription Type button vs the rest using the Buy Now button? Will both sets of members get reminder emails (this is setup to 3 days before expiry)?

Will there be any advantage for us to purchase WP eStore in this setup? Please advise. Thanks.

[wzp]

Will there be any advantage for us to purchase WP eStore in this setup?

Using eStore, you can set inventory limits for the exact number of memberships:

• https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-estore-plugin-complete-solution-to-sell-digital-products-from-your-wordpress-blog-securely-1059?ap_id=TheAssurer

   

• https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/wp-estore-plugin-how-to-limit-inventory-for-particular-product-is-there-a-way

 

The various memberships would be defined as products, with inventory levels.

[karencheah]

Without actually going ahead to purchase eStore first, I would like to understand how it works to see if we will benefit from having the extra plugin.

It is good to know that we can use inventory limits to keep the number of initial members to 1500. Would we need to define the monthly payment and annual payment for the same membership as 2 products? Hopefully not. But if we need to, how would you suggest to keep the inventory limit of the combination of these 2 products to 1500.

Progressing from the 1500 initial members, is there a way for the product to switch over to the higher priced product when the 1500 is sold? That means that the higher priced product is only available for purchase when the first 1500 has been sold.

Would appreciate your advice on this before we consider purchasing eStore. Thanks.

[admin]

You would need to create 2 subscription type products (one for the monthly subscription and one for the yearly subscription). You could start by having a limit of 750 to both. Then later you can adjust that number based on which item is more popular. Are you talking about all 1500 spots being sold in like a few hours or are we talking about days/weeks?

To increase the price, you have two options when you want to do it:

1) Create new products with the new pricing and then replace the existing ones with the new products. This option is better as you will still have all the info of your old items stored in the plugin.

OR

2) Edit the existing products then change the price and reset the inventory count.

[karencheah]

The 1500 spots will probably take more than weeks to be sold out so I suppose we could adjust it manually as the sales progress. Is there a feature for the admin to be notified when the inventory falls below a certain level? In that case, we only check when the trigger notifies us.

Let’s call the first 1500 subscription A-annual and A-monthly. And lets call the subsequent products after the 1500 has been sold B-annual and B-monthly. So when A-annual and A-monthly have run out of stock, we will take them off sale and put on B-annual and B-monthly. How do the customers who have purchase A-annual and A-monthly renew their subscription? Will it affect them that those products are not for sale anymore?

As for B-annual and B-monthly, when there’s a price increase, I assume we will edit the product price. For customers who have purchased these subscriptions, will their renewal automatically pick up the new price?

[admin]

You can create a renewal page where you put the product A so those members can pay that same price that they used to join. The following documentation explains how you can create a renewal page:

https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-membership/how-to-create-payment-buttons-for-membership-upgrade-189

You can also create different membership level to handle these two groups. Level A and Level B. They can have the same content protection settings but you can use this to handle certain things differently for the groups. For example: you can apply section protection on your renewal page so level A users can see the product A and Level B users can see the product B.

[karencheah]

So can I conclude that having eStore will only assist with managing the inventory levels so that we can know quickly how many memberships have been sold. Are there any other benefits of having eStore on top of eMembers? I’d assume it would make it easier to manage the items to be sold – can we manage it all within eStore without having to go to Paypal to create buttons?

[admin]

Yes, eStore will make it easier to manage the items sold (you won’t need to go to paypal to create buttons).

eStore does like hundreds of things so a summary answer won’t really work. You gotta read the features page of the plugin then determine for yourself.

[Author]

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