Hi everyone... I have a question about non standard member charges. I have amember setup for our membership site and working great, it is integrated with idevaffiliate and all is good. My question is this. We are starting to offer services that are billed monthly in addition to member access to the web site. These services are sometimes discounted so it is possible that the cost is different per month. Also, for these services there is a setup fee and sometimes these fees are spread out over a few months. So my question is... Is there a way to have amember automatically bill for these even with a unique cost and also spread out the setup fees and automatically bill for them until they are paid? I am hoping so because that makes it all really simple since the payment and affiliate is already setup. Thanks!
I see no way of automatically billing charges when the charges are random. If there is a pattern to your charges, then it may be possible to create a custom plugin to add this feature, but aMember "out of the box" only deals with trial periods and regular payment amounts. The ONLY way I can see coming close to this would be to selling combinations of "memberships" which work together to create the billing system you want. For example, you can have a "setup charge" membership which bills the setup fee over however many payments you want. You can have a "discounted" membership to offer those customers you give the discount to. You can have a membership charge the customer once every 4 months if needed to get the pattern of payments you require. By signing up a customer to multiple memberships, it's possible to get practically any structured payment scenario you may need. The trick would be to get the customer signed up to the right combination of memberships to make it happen. I think JLogica has a plugin that will enable you to combine at least 2 memberships into a single signup. Not sure if it can be extended to meet your needs or not, but it's the closest thing I can think of.
thanks for the reply. The monthly amount does not change within a recurring cycle, but can be different between customers, but not within the same customer. so, let me ask this question, is there a way to set it up without actually going through the front end sign-up process. Can I from the admin side setup the payments. Basically, I am trying to set everything up for the customer without them having to do anything. I cannot figure out how to setup a membership from within the admin interface. I see how to add charges but not sure on the membership side. Again thanks for the reply.
Sorry, I must have misunderstood what you meant here about different costs per month. Setting up memberships in the admin is easy. Just go into the customer record, select "User Payments / Subscriptions" on the top of the page, and use the "ADD NEW PAYMENT/SUBSCRIPTION" area to add a membership. Since I haven't done this myself, I can't say exactly how the charges are handled. I think aMember will handle rebillings if you enter the customer's CC details. You may have to handle the initial payment manually through your payment processor, or set up a 1-day trial and let aMember handle the first payment as a rebill. Of course, you COULD just go through the normal signup page as if you were your customer and create everything that way to. This way, everything is handled normally.