Hello, I was just wondering how to set up a free trial. I want it so that it says free trial as the product. I also want it so that a user cant keep signing up for the free trial. Also is it possible to have it expire in an hour?
Is there a way to disable them to have to input there credit card information?
Paul,
Users must enter their payment information at the start of a Free Trial so that they will be automatically billed when their free trial is over (unless they cancel first). This is how most sites work.
If you want to offer a "no-strings-attached" free trial, then you can add a free membership that will only last for X amount of days and then expire. Users won't be taken to PayPal or enter their credit card for free memberships.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting
So, I want to offer my users a free trial with no strings attached and do not want them to have to go to Paypal. I can add the trial no problem. But then it gets suboptimal.
1. If I put the trial on the registration page, the text underneath the radio button reads: "You will be taken to a page to pay for your membership." This will put people off as they will think it is just a trick to extract their payment details rather than a true no strings trial.
2. So, I thought I would use the link provided to have them buy the free membership after they registered (eg "www.site.com/membership/purchase/5". BUT, this does not seem to work at all unless there is a gateway enabled. And if there is, it takes the client to the Paypal page. Again, not what I want.
Its a bit frustrating. It seems like it should all be much easier to use than I am finding it. Any ideas?
So I think what I'm doing might be helpful, it's definitely not the same as what you're looking for, but hopefully I can provide some insight into a reasonable way to accomplish what you want.
Free Trials on the site I'm working with are a relatively exclusive item that most users should never have access to (and thus, hidden registration pages wouldn't do me much good, I NEVER want someone to find them)
The trick, then, is just that I don't use Free Trials at all, I just have an administrator give them a free copy of the membership they are receiving a trial for, and set an expiration date on it.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think you essentially have to do something kinda along these lines at the moment.
I believe the trouble is that you can't have a Free Trial account that will roll over into a Paid Membership because the Gateway handles the Free Trial, not MS Membership Suite.
To get local control of something approximating Free Trials, you need to use memberships that don't go through a Gateway, ie free memberships with an expiration date and some workflow:
For example, for fine grained permissions over how this works you could do something like this:
- only allow anonymous / authenticated users to buy free trials
- or for more fine grained control, after authentication assign users a specific role that can buy free trials
- "promote" them to a role that can't buy the free trials when it ends
- optionally promote them when they buy a membership too, to get rid of the Free Trial links
Hope that helps.
PS: If you allow anonymous members to see the Free Trial, a tricky user will realize quite quickly that by creating a new account they can get another free trail - this could be a pretty critical issue, depending on what your memberships do
I can't really see any way of getting around this other than not allowing anonymous members to see the Free Trials - a workflow which isn't quite as convenient for the end user as seeing it on the registration page, but isn't terrible either - in my case, I have email / password validation on, so a user ends up at their user page after their first login, and is thus presented with membership options as soon as they have confirmed their email address and set a secure password.
PPS: For a variety of reasons, I have avoided the clone User Registration Page on Checkout Page, and thus forgot about this, clever use of this could probably be used to solve my previous addendum
(but there are some compatibility issues to consider there, since not all modules interact correctly with the user registration page, you can get artifacts from other modules, or end up with broken triggers)
Paul,
You can name the plan anything you want, so naming it 'Free Trial' would be a good idea. Set it to recurring, and for the Trial, set it to 1 day (1 day is the smallest unit for PayPal - Authorize.net is 1 week). You can set the plan to only be available to anonymous users, not authenticated users. This will stop users from signing up for the same plan over and over with the same account/email address.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting