I have the "bronze, silver and gold" membership plans and I would like to provide a link in certain cases for the user to upgrade their plan.
I looked through the modules/forms and do not see this anywhere. Any pointers?
thanks!
Upgrading from one membership to another is a sticky matter. None of the Payment Gateways offer a solid method of upgrading recurring payments. PayPal is the only one that comes close, and yet there are many flaws with their approach as well, such as limits and the fact that you must wait until the next billing period for the changes to kick in.
I have been working on a good way to allow Membership Suite to handle upgrading accounts, by charging users a pro-rated fee, but there are a lot of issues to consider and it hasn't gotten very far yet. I will bump this up on the list of feature requests.
There are two types of memberships:
The first is the One-Time payment Membership, which can be renewed, extended, and can expire. These memberships could be upgraded by taking the amount of time left in the membership, calculate how much that is worth based on the price of the current membership, and then give a discount of that much when the user upgrades to the next level of plan. For memberships that don't expire, this would be simpler. There wouldn't really be a way to 'downgrade' the membership.
The other kind of Membership is the Recurring Payment Membership. These ones are MUCH more tricky, because the Payment Gateways have different ways of doing this. Usually you cannot modify the Recurring Payments very much, so the best way would be to cancel the current recurring payment subscription and start a new recurring payment subscription. This is the most likely approach that will work for all of the payment gateways.
This is definitely something that I am working on, but I don't know when it will be ready yet.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting
I see that a month has gone by. Do you have an updated timeline on when this feature will be supported?
Since it says on the module Overview page, "What I needed then was a simple solution which handled everything that a Paid Membership Website would need; from User Signup to Cancellations and Upgrades, to Recurring Billing and Email Notifications.", what does "Upgrades" mean? How are others handling upgrades using the features provided now?
+1 for this feature. I was just going to ask about this, and searched the existing forum topics, finding this thread.
This is an example situation I need to figure out:
1) A user signs up for student membership.
2) Several months go by, and the membership will soon expire.
3) The system emails the user notifying them that the membership expiration is approaching soon. At this point, I would like to suggest in the "Expiring Soon" email that if the user is not a student anymore, they should instead purchase the full membership plan. I would need a static URL in which to redirect them, with a list of the available memberships that they can otherwise purchase.
4) The user decides to purchase a full membership as they are no longer a student.
4) A few days go by, the original student plan expires, and the system emails the user that the student membership has expired. Keep in mind, I have setup the membership plan to remove the member role if the user let's the membership expire.
5) Even though the user purchased a full membership, and they were granted the member role for purchasing that full membership, their role will still be removed once the student membership expires, right after the user just purchased a full membership! Not good in this case.
In summary, I need to get a few things figured out:
- Either offer an upgrade option to the user OR allow them to purchase another plan. The system will consider this situation, and skips the process of sending out the previous plan's expiration notice, but also retains the member role, even though the original plan has expired.
- Setup a page which can be referenced from an email if the user decides to upgrade. This may already be available, assuming I can list the plans available on the user profile screen.
Also, all of my membership plans are "one-time" payments, not recurring. That may make things easier.
This is something that is coming out in Membership Suite 6.9. I'm working on a new Recurring Plan API that will allow Payment Gateways which support it (Authorize.net CIM and PayPal WPS) to allow users to 'modify' their membership. Different gateways handle this different ways, so it will depend on which gateway you use as to how easy it is for users to Modify their membership plan. For example, with PayPal WPS, you can only increase the price by 20% every 180 days, so that will need to be taken into account when creating your upgrade plans.
I am working on some new Authorize.net CIM features which are simply amazing! With them, you can allow your users to easily and seamlessly upgrade/downgrade their recurring memberships with a single click from their user account, without even having to enter their payment details again. With CIM, the recurring payments are processed by your Drupal site with Cron, so you can easily change the payment schedule. You can also let users purchase files, nodes, and other products without needing to enter their payment details again (their info is stored on Authorize.net's secure CIM servers, so you don't need to worry about PCI compliance but can still offer all of the benefits to your users). It still needs some work but it is getting close! :)
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting
Terrific. We look forward to 6.9. When will it be released?
It is mostly done now, I am just doing some beta testing and getting the kinks worked out. Whenever there is a release that is this big, I always take extra time to make sure there aren't any new bugs that have been introduced into the system.
In fact, if anyone here would be willing to help me beta test it, let me know by email or opening a support ticket and I'll send you version 6.9 now.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting
I'm trying 6.9 locally and cannot seem to get upgrade options to show up on the user account page. We want to enforce single membership plan, I think. When we turn that off, purchase options show up but when I click them, I get an Access Denied page even though I have the membership plans allowing upgrade from the one already assigned to the user. The user's plan is a non-recurring free membership with no expiration. What am I missing?
Tim,
Check your permissions. There is a permission called 'modify own membership' and that needs to be granted to the users who you want to be able to upgrade/downgrade their membership.
Also, I've revamped the upgrade process again in Membership Suite 6.10, which I hope to release soon... I'll make a video tutorial once it is ready.
Sincerely,
Leighton Whiting
Can someone from moneyscripts reply to this post?
Thanks!