Fill out registration form and then pay?

[MikeB]

I am the webmaster for the a state affiliate of a healthcare professional organization. We have one level of membership and sell discounted membership vouchers that saves our members $15 when renewing memberships. This same discounted voucher can be purchased by new members for initial registration.

I would like to have new members be able to fill out the registration form and then select their payment method. Following payment, all new members are verified by the Treasurer and Membership Chairman to insure that they qualify for membership. If they don't qualify, we issue a refund.

How do configure s2Member to handle registration and then payment? If someone registers and then doesn't pay, they will get an email requesting payment. If they don't pay they get removed from the system.

We use PayPal and USA ePay. We are considering adding Google Checkout and dropping PayPal. (There's a lot of loathing out there for PayPal.)

Some background:

I have tried other membership systems (MM and WLM). Neither seems to be able to handle the preregistration issue, and both misrepresented their import capabilities. We got our credit card company to cancel the MM payment when they flat refused to honor their 30 day guarantee (after 9 days). I waited too long fooling around with WLM before realizing that they were blowing smoke about their import capabilities. We will gladly flush the $97 before hand entering over 800 member profiles.

I like what I have seen so far with s2Member. I'm going to set up a test import today.

[Cristián Lávaque]

Hi Mike.

Well, I don't see why it'd be complicated to have the user create an account first and then pay.

One way would be having open registrations WP Admin -> s2Member -> General Options -> Open Registration and editing the new user email to ask them to pay for the membership. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ne ... il-set-up/

You can also edit the Login Welcome Page WP Admin -> s2Member -> General Options -> Login Welcome Page to check the user's level with a conditional and if 0 (free account) show them the payment options. WP Admin -> s2Member -> API / Scripting -> Using Simple Conditionals

You could leave those accounts if you want to, protecting your paid content at a level above 0 will hide it from them anyway, but you at least keep them in your system to continue the communication trying to convert them into paying customers. Just an idea.

I'd also suggest the s2Member pro-forms, which allow registration and payment in one step, but they are only available for PayPal or Authorize.Net. Google Checkout is only implemented with buttons. The other gateway, ePay, is not supported by s2Member, but you could try integrating it following this tip viewtopic.php?f=36&t=3154

About importing users, s2Member Pro has an import tool wP Admin -> s2Member -> Impor/Export, but it's not avaialble in the free version of the plugin. http://s2member.com Here you can see a screenshot of it to get an idea of what it's like http://www.s2member.com/wp-content/uplo ... -1200x.jpg

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

[MikeB]

Hi Cristián ,

Thanks for the reply and the good information.

Would this work?

I set up a Level0 for free signup to the online newsletter and general notifications. I put all the needed registration information on this page with an option to pay for full membership by clicking the payment button of their choice. If they just want the free (newsletter) membership they don't click a payment button.

Please confirm that the import function is only available in the Pro version. If I can get registration and payment working (the way we need it to) on the free version, I'll buy the Pro version. One cool thing I already see that I like about the Import in s2Member is that it provides for an ID field. Each of our members has a unique Member ID number, so this will greatly help the import.

[Cristián Lávaque]

Yes, the setup you mention would work well. You can set all that up without needing the Pro add-on to test it.

The import tool does have an ID field, but that's for the WordPress' account ID so you can update existing users with the Import tool, not just create new ones. If you need your organization's member ID in his profile, I suggest creating a Custom Registration Field and add it there. WP Admin -> s2Member -> General Options -> Custom Registration Fields

I hope that helps.

[MikeB]

We have our current member database in Microsoft Excel format so I can readily generate a CSV file.
I need to import the following fields:

Member Number (this is the number assigned by the professional association)
Member Name (I can divide this into First, last if needed)
Member Address
Member City
Member State
Member Zip
Member Phone
Member Email
(I can also assign a user name and password if needed for import)

It is my understanding that only the s2Member Pro version has import capability. I am quite willing to purchase the pro version but I would like to install it on a test domain, perform configuration and testing to get the import working correctly and then transfer s2Member to the production site. Is this feasible?

[Cristián Lávaque]

Here's the documentation for the Import tool (click it to see the full image):

Member Number (this is the number assigned by the professional association)

You'll have to add this as a custom field at the end of each row. Remember the format to import the custom fields in the current version is "Custom Field ID #1","Custom Field Value #1","Custom Field ID #2","Custom Field Value #2", ... E.g.:
,"member_number","123"

Member Name (I can divide this into First, last if needed)

Separating would be good, you can then enter them to the first and last name columns.

Member Address
Member City
Member State
Member Zip
Member Phone

All custom fields:
,"address","123 Blah Street","city","Los Angeles","state","California","zip_code","12345","phone","123-12345678"

Member Email

This one would go in the email column.

(I can also assign a user name and password if needed for import)

Yes, you need to enter a username. Password is not required, if empty and the member can be asked to generate a new one with the lost password form: /wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

I would like to install it on a test domain, perform configuration and testing to get the import working correctly and then transfer s2Member to the production site. Is this feasible?

Yes, this is possible. It gets a little tricky if you're migrating all WordPress because the domain name needs to be updated in a few places, including a serialized array in the database. Let us know if you need help when you try that.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have more questions.

[MikeB]

Hi Christian,

Wow! Thanks for the extensive reply and answers. I'm already getting way more help here than I've gotten from the support desk of other membership plugin companies.

I'm going to give s2Member Pro a try.

Many Thanks,
Mike

[Cristián Lávaque]

Awesome! Let us know if you need any more help.