Create monthly payment plan for fixed time period

Hi,

We have a product we sell as a straight download through e-Junkie at the moment, but I would like to move everything into Amember if possible as the file size of our download has got too big (up to about 3GB) and I would like to use Amember with the Amazon S3 integration (or one day Cloudfront if this is possible).

I'm hoping someone with a bit of experience with Amember can recommend the best way to achieve the following set-up, and indeed whether this is possible at all:

I have simplified this a bit, but essentially what we want to achieve is to allow people (using PayPal) to EITHER pay €100 for a straight download (and get access to the whole product immediately), or pay €10 a month for a fixed time period (in this case 10 months) and receive the above product broken up into 10 'chunks'.

So effectively we would like to introduce a 'payment plan' where every time they are billed €10, they get the next set of files. So it would work like this:

Sign-up day - Customer is billed €10 and gets access to 10 PDFS and 10MP3s
Sign-up day plus 1 month - Customer billed €10 and gets access to another 10 PDFS and 10MP3s
Sign-up day plus 2 months - Customer billed €10 and gets access to another 10 PDFS and 10MP3s
Sign-up day plus 3 months - Customer billed €10 and gets access to another 10 PDFS and 10MP3s
etc until...
Sign-up day plus 9 months (Final month) - Customer is charged their final €10, gets access to the final set of files and as he/she has now paid €100 in total, the recurring billing agreement with PayPal is closed automatically.

If the customer cancels the agreement at any point, say after 2 months, they still have access to the files they have paid for so far.

Is this possible?

Would it perhaps be better to bill the customer on the initial sign-up day, and then on the 1st day of the subsequent months?

Would I need to set up each of the above months as a separate product (or product category) with its own password protected download page with a set of associated files on Amazon S3?

It would be really appreciated if someone could please point me in the right direction for how to set this up.

Many thanks,

Tom

This is very doable with aMember. I would use WordPress as the front end for a slick user experience. You use a combination of recurring payments and incremental content delivery to do this.

The payment approach goes like this.

• Set up a recurring product for the 10 months worth of payments.
• In WordPress you build 10 pages that contain links to the products the user should have for the given month (all the links on the page could also be protected by aMember)
• You use the incremental drip feature of the aMember WordPress plugin to allow access to the pages based on days from the start of the service. For example:
  • Page 1 is visible from "Start" to "Forever"
  • Page 2 is visible from "Day 30" to "Forever"
  • Page 3 is visible from "Day 60" to "Forever"
  • Etc
• aMember can dynamically control the WordPress custom menu system so you could have each new page show up in a menu when it is time to display.

Hi Grant,

Thanks very much for your quick reply. It sounds very positive... I have a couple more quick questions if that's OK:

1. Do you know whether the incremental drip feature would work *without* using the Wordpress plugin?

I am actually a reasonably advanced Wordpress user and I already have about 10 Wordpress installations to update, backup etc. With this site, I'm trying to minimize any future maintenance work by keeping things very, very simple and using static & responsive HTML landing pages for the membership pages.

2. In Amember how would I ensure that the recurring payments stop automatically after x months once the customer has paid the full €100?

It's obviously fundamental to this working that a customer is only billed the 10 installments, then their billing agreement with PayPal should be terminated automatically. It's effectively a recurring billing agreement that lasts a fixed time period of 10 months. Do you know if Amember allows for this 'end date' to be input (e.g. as sign-up date PLUS x months) when the recurring payments are first set up with PayPal?

3. Do you have any suggestions on how to structure the products/categories/landing pages and protected links?

So, on sign up day and every subsequent month the customer gets access to:

• One Protected Directory (say mydomain.com/members/month1) containing a single HTML Landing page
• 1 Zip file containing 10 PDFs and 10 MP3 files

Does this mean that I create 10 products in the system (one for each membership month), under which there are 2 'sub-products' they can access - the html landing page in a protected directory, and the protected Zip file hosted on Amazon S3?

Or would it be better to set up each month as a product category containing two sub-products (the protected directory and one or more files hosted on Amazon?).

I spent a couple of days experimenting with the system and going through the documentation, but still I wasn't clear about this.

Thanks very much again,

Tom

I am not sure; however, I do not see a setting anywhere in the aMember CP. While aMember is a powerful membership script, IMHO the user interface is not very elegant. When you use aMember to power a mature CMS, such as WordPress, the user experience is much better and is well worth the extra effort.

You establish the payment amount, the length of the recurring periods and the number of recurring periods when you set up the product. You can also break this into a trial price and a regular price.

This is the solution with WordPress.

• In aMember you create a membership product with the 10 recurring payments.
• You create 10 WordPress pages
• On each page you place links to the S3 files you want the user to have for a given month. The links are generated using aMember so they are expiring links and cannot be bookmarked.
• You then set up the pages to become available on the drip schedule (i.e. Page 1 will be "Start to "Forever", Page 2 will be "Day 30 to Forever", Page 3 will be "Day 60 to "Forever", etc)
• You could then place these pages in a WordPress custom menu and when the user is entitled to see the page they would become visible on the menu.

Sure, will work with amember created pages too, or using amember created links, or amember hooked S3 content.

But agree with grant- you can make it look quite nice with wordpress.

think grants got youcovered on all other q's.

David

Thanks very much Grant and David - I really appreciate your help on this. I've got a much better idea now and I'll give it a go as you suggested over the next few weeks!