Suggestion for new Dependency Feature

Alex,

The new dependency feature looks good and I can see great ways to use it. It will be a great way to offer special pricing on renewal packages for those that keep a subscription current.

The way it appears to work is that a product with dependency criteria is shown to all users on both the signup page and the membership page. If a member (who does not qualify for the product) picks the product there is a message that informs him/her why they do not qualify for the product.

It would be 10 fold better if you could program this feature to not show them products they do not qualify for. I think it would be pretty confusing for members to be picking products only to find out they do not qualify for them. They might get frustrated and not subscribe to anything.

Hopefully others will respond to this thread to contibute their thoughts. It is a great feature, but would be fantastic if it would only show products to those that could buy them.

Thanks for your great product and service!

Grant Swaim
Greensboro, NC

Yep, I get the picture. To be quite honest, I was approaching the dependency feature from the angle that it was being used to control the subscriptions that were available to a person that had previously purchased a subscription.

When I saw the two condiitons that can be required to make a subscription available as "Require Active Subscription X" or "Require Expired Subscription X" I instantly started thinking of the power of promoting upgrades and renewals.

You could offer a renewal subscription at a significant discount as long as they had an active subscription. You could also offer a lessor discounted renewal if they had an expired subscription. You could also offer certain products if they had previously subscribed to other products. The sky is the limit!

I just seems like a good option to be able to only show the products that a given member was eligible to purchase.

In the case like on aMember where you must purchase certain products in combinations, that seems like an even bigger and somewhat different nightmare, due to the different combinations that members may need.

For instance I sell access to 10 different training modules for 60 days. You can purchase any or all of then. I also offer a subscription that gives you access to all of them. So I don't want someone to subscribe to all access plan and also purchase an individual module (by mistake or by ignorance). Ultimately I would need to be issuing a refund for the individual class subscription. I help prevent this now by using price groups and only showing the all access plan on the first page they see. I include a link to a page with the individual classes if they want that. This way they cannot buy both on a single transaction. Anyway, by combining many of the features you have programmed in, you can do some pretty creative stuff with aMember!

In closing, please take in under advisement

Grant