Paid clubs - Open or Closed

[Makoto]

With the current paid club system, the only way to restrict access to the clubs content to paid members only is to make the club Closed.

This, however, requires members be manually approved by a moderator before they're able to join,

This otherwise works as intended. Even after approval, members are not allowed to access the clubs content until they pay their invoice.

However, if the club is Open, anyone can view the clubs content whether they are a member (subscribed) or not.

The problem here is, there is currently no way to make a paid club that requires membership without also requiring manual moderator approval of members.

You either make it open where anyone can pay to join the club without moderator approval and give everyone access to all the clubs content whether they're subscribed or not (generally ruining the point of a paid membership), or make it a closed system and create an unnecessary burden on both the members and the club owner/sites moderation team by having to "approve" members before they can pay their invoice to join.

[bfarber]

I feel this is mostly a general feature suggestion so I'm going to move the topic.

[rayzir]

I'm trying to figure this out too.  I don't want folks to have access to the content unless they pay for it.  But requiring a the club owner to approve membership makes what could be a 1 step process into 3 step process.  With that much of a process, it gets confusing for the buyer.  And since payment isn't immediately taken care of, the customer would have time to "re-think" their purchase, or find access to information from another source.  I want to make sure I take advantage of the impulse buy/immediate gratification the purchaser is looking for.

I tried looking for a plugin, but didn't see anything in the marketplace.  Or is there a simple fix I can patch into my community?

 

[jmw253]

Yeah, I'm going to bump this...

This is a massive oversight on how paid clubs should work. If anything, you Invision needs to add a toggle for Closed clubs that would disable or enable leader approval if the club is a paid club. This should be relatively simple to implement as a product feature. You basically break the order flow for a club at the moment the way things currently are, and as such really harm conversion rates.

In addition, a system to promote content within the "paid" club should be made available. I could see this applying to gallery and downloads, and simply offering an option when adding that feature to the club (IE: make it so you can toggle this an "open or promoted" section of this closed club so members can sample content before making a subscription purchase.