Community Support Forums

Hi all,

our site has over 400 registered users and we'd like to start charging access to some of our sections.
However, at the moment we can not provide payments over the PayPal service, but we might be able to do it in a month or so.
In the meantime we'd like to have our customers buy subscriptions off-line and than later on to allow them to renew their subscriptions via PayPal.

What would be the best way to set this up?

I've read about the Open Registration and then making a PayPal® Button available to Free Subscribers, however in our case the users would not be free subscribers, bu acctually level 1, so I'm not sure this is the way to go...

Also, what would I have to do to have customers using off-line payment method get the confirmation email, once they choose to buy the subscription?

Thank you in advance...

Mo

I understand what you are trying to do, it seems like an offline payment option would open a huge can of worms for you to manage and sort through. Are you ready to handle that kind of traffic, detail, and volume?

S2 Member has plenty of options for running manual offline payments. You could use the S2 interface to do the following:

1) Allow Open Registration which is level zero - free subscribers. Your current 400 subscribers would already become level zero members once you installed S2.

2) In Registration and Profile Fields, design a form that asks enough questions to qualify your new subscribers, such as mailing address for sending them invoices and hoping that they send you money.

3) In email configuration, send your newly signed up members a welcome message that provides your mailing address and ask for money. When they send you a money order you can manually elevate their membership status up to Level 1 through 4 (the paid subscription levels).

4) When you receive payment in the mail, as the administrator, you can retrieve the WordPress User (who should be level zero) add their payment info into the S2 section refered to as the "Paid Subcriber ID," and manually edit them up to the paid level that was promised. This takes two entries on the User Profile page. You can also add in an Automatic EOT (subscription End Of Term) time that will cause your manual member to expire.

I do not believe that S2 has a facility to automatically email your manual subscribers that they need to renew their subscription when their EOT time is approaching. If you integrate PAYPAL Subscriptions in a few months, then your next step should be to move manual subscribers to the PayPal button method where all this is automated between PayPal and S2 Member. Doing this is as easy as giving them a member options purchase page with PayPal buttons describing what they would be purchasing.

You could also use S2 conditionals to have such a sales page pop-up after the subscriber's manual EOT has run out. How? When they run out of EOT time on a level 1 membership, they demote to level zero. Make the menbership options PayPal buttons only appear to Level zero members...

Once again, these are just suggestions for how to use the S2Member tools to create manual members, I do recommend that you migrate from manual members to the PayPal subscribers method. If you need OFFLINE manual payment management for a few month till you can setup your PayPal business account, then S2 Member seems to have that ability. It may create a bunch of manual work, but once you move your members to PayPal, then your time will free up to create member content. You don't want to spend too much time managing your members at the detriment of developing fresh content which is what attracts your customers in the first place.