Help on Subscription + free monthly product

Discussion in 'Troubleshooting' started by jlaura, Oct 26, 2011.

  1. jlaura

    jlaura New Member

    Joined:
    Oct 19, 2011
    Messages:
    1
    Hey I haven't found anything on this yet, been looking on the forum for 3 days. I'm going to talk to support tonight when they get on, I'm -06:00 GMT.

    Here's what I'm doing. I'm going to have a membership site, where I offer free podcasts and recordings of teleconference calls. Each month of the customer's membership will give them that month's podcasts.

    Here's the thing. I don't want my current subscribers getting annoyed at people who get on say 6 months down the line having access to every single podcast, because they haven't paid for it or put in as much as they have, instead I want new people to only have access to this month's podcast.

    Second, I want to offer customers that come in the future, the past podcast at the same rate as a monthly membership, that way they don't feel left out or that they have missed out on something if they want the past content. Say membership is 39 bucks, then I want to offer past products (the podcast) for 39 bucks.

    At first I was looking at the incremental plugin. I tried that but came across some issues. One being that it only gives a link and not an actual product. Great, but doesn't help me when it comes to setting up restrictions for what customers can buy or individual folders based on individual products(months). To prevent hassles dealing with customer service, I only want to allow customers to be able to purchase past months that they do not currently own. It be great if the incremental plugin would work with actual products instead of just links. I still may find a use for the incremental plugin later on in the game.

    The idea that I came up with today, is I could have the membership set up to give access to say a folder /currentmonth/ then put in the current material in there. After the month ends, I could create a folder called, January, February, ETC (Last Month) and set up a product that gives them access to that folder, I'll make that product the same cost as a monthly membership fee. Then after that, current subscribers, I could email them a "Coupon" for 100% for the product that was just created, and give it to current subscribers. This way current subscribers don't have to pay extra for the month, they get it along with the membership.

    Problem: this will work for exactly what I need, though it's not automatic, and will require more work than I want. Here's the issue, It would be very difficult to send out 1000 individual emails with individual coupons. For this idea to work, I would need something that can send out a mass email to all of my active members with individual coupons in them for the current product that they are subscribed too. Currently I do not know how to go about doing this or what plugin I would need, software, etc.

    Any ideas, or does anyone have any better ideas for how to go about doing this.

    1. Membership plus free monthly product, new month = new product
    2. Can purchase past products if they weren't a member at the time and don't currently own product
    3. Protection for each product and member given access if they own that particular product only. Just because they are a member, does not mean they have access to every folder, unless, they have been there since the very beginning.

    This is what I need. I do not believe the incremental plugin can make this happen, as I do not see a way to give out individual products. The links are just not going to work. I need individual protection for individual products.

    Thanks to anyone that can shed some light on how to do this.
  2. davidm1

    davidm1 aMember User & Partner

    Joined:
    May 16, 2006
    Messages:
    4,437
    The "of the month" model will require customization- amember doesnt do it naturally and theres no plugin to do it for podcasts.

    Ive used the incremental content plugin with wordpress to make it happen for online site and now Ken Gary has a "content of the month" plugin for wordpress that will work for content in a wordpress site- but this wont help you with a podcast since this requires a different sort of protection than what is normally used (htaccess vs. htpsswd)


    David

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