Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications By Matt Monday at 02:04 PM
Pavel Chernitsky Posted January 31, 2021 Posted January 31, 2021 TL;DR: How to best give one month of subscription to a referrer and referred and then cancel it if they don't renew? *My head is kind of all over the place so if something isn't properly explained, please ask and I will elaborate. This is super important (make or break situation) and I have to get it figured out. Ok, so: I want to try something out, but the plethora of options and possible ways to approach it got my head spinning... WE have a bunch of subscriptions running right now and I want to use them in order to encourage referrals AND subscription purchases. What I want to do is, when someone registers, if they were referred to our site by someone, I want both of them to get a free month of one of the subscriptions. This can obviously be done manually by adding both of them to a subscription plan and removing them a month later, but that seems too dumb, and also won't achieve the second half of my goal - retaining the said new user as a paying customer. What I want, is a way to add both the new and the existing user to the subscription for no charge, and send out all the emails as if they bought it, but NOT to automatically charge them the renewal fee. The goal is that if they don't renew the subscription, it just gets canceled. I saw there's an option to give "Credits" (I guess you could make it automatic), but I pretty reluctant to use it since I want to make the process as seamless as possible for the end-user and not have the first thing they do in a new website is give their address/c.c details/go through a purchase process.
bfarber Posted February 1, 2021 Posted February 1, 2021 Unfortunately what you are after is not built in and would require either some manual work (i.e. credits can be issued, and can be used to sign up for a subscription), or a custom plugin.
Pavel Chernitsky Posted February 1, 2021 Author Posted February 1, 2021 Thanks, could you maybe elaborate on the credits "method" and tell me the process in broad strokes? I've been playing around with the referral system, but it looks like you could only make this work for purchases and not registrations. Also, if any of the plugin makers have a good idea - I'd love to hear it.
Pavel Chernitsky Posted February 9, 2021 Author Posted February 9, 2021 Hey, does anybody have any idea on how to implement this (or something similar)? @Jordan Invision maybe?
CoffeeCake Posted February 9, 2021 Posted February 9, 2021 5 hours ago, Pavel Chernitsky said: Hey, does anybody have any idea on how to implement this (or something similar)? We did this manually. I'll review our notes and get back to you on what we did.
CoffeeCake Posted February 9, 2021 Posted February 9, 2021 No worries! What we did was add an invoice, add the subscription with a time limit, and then a misc charge with a negative amount so that the invoice total was $0. For example, if your subscription is $5: Create invoice for member Add subscription (customer now owes $5) Add misc charge of -$5 with a description that says "Thanks for the referral!" or whatever you'd like. Confirm invoice is $0 You can then mark the invoice as paid if not automatically marked as such.The caveat is that invoices require a billing address to mark them as paid. The customer gets an e-mail on the invoice creation, and can finish checkout, which basically asks them to enter in the missing details. They owe zero at the end. They will then get a renewal invoice once expired nearing the end of term and can choose to renew or not.
Pavel Chernitsky Posted February 10, 2021 Author Posted February 10, 2021 Thanks a lot! But I think I must be missing something - does this method works automatically? And if it does, how is that part set-up? Because if it doesn't, I think (haven't really tried it yet) this could be done more easily somehow using a subscription with different initial and renewal prices, no?
CoffeeCake Posted February 10, 2021 Posted February 10, 2021 3 hours ago, Pavel Chernitsky said: does this method works automatically? And if it does, how is that part set-up? No, we manually created invoices. It was a one-time thing and we didn't have a need for automation.
Pavel Chernitsky Posted February 10, 2021 Author Posted February 10, 2021 Got it, thanks. We're trying to find some way to get this to be automatic because we're lazy af but at this rate I'm not sure we'll be able to...
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