Online Store: Member 'Credits' System
With the talk of Wild Apricot integrating an online store, I think it would be phenomenal to integrate a 'credits' system as seen in many other membership softwares (including video game subscriptions and self-education learning sites).
The online store could have a totally traditional functionality, with the customer purchasing items in USD, without membership being a necessity.
However, the store items could ALSO be purchased with 'credits'. Members would get a monthly 'allowance' with their site membership (as designated by the site admin). For example, my company is called Torches Academy - I might be selling T-shirts for $20 or 600 credits. Members will get, say 300 credits per month with their Torches Academy membership. After 2 months, a member would have enough credits saved on their account to get a 'free' T-shirt. This could even be integrated to unlock member-exclusive pages and such as well.
I think this is extremely beneficial because it gives the site owners the ability to incentivize long-term memberships. As someone who is running an educational website on WA, it would be absolutely HUGE to be able to moderate the speed that users are downloading my intellectual property. It's not at all a cash grab prospect as much as it is just preventing someone from joining for a month, taking all they can get/view, and canceling. This credit system would do exactly that, and offer site owners new and creative ways to 'trickle out' their website experience and encourage long-term membership.
Mike Harrison
shared this idea
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Karen commented
We could use the credits system versus a $0.00 pricing option. Either one would work for us.
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That sounds interesting. Now we are mostly focused on developing rather 'traditional' functionality like product variations or shipping. We'll see if this idea finds support.
