Different sub levels causes confusion

I have only recently become aware of an issue concerning the way one might use different subscription levels. I have 3 levels for a magazine site – buy this issue, annual and premium. The problem is when a customer buys, say, an annual subscription they of course do not obtain access to the premium level. So, when the click on the premium article they are taken back to the subscription page. But, they think they are already a subscriber so they feel frustrated and can’t understand why this is happening. Can you suggest the best way of overcoming the problem?

You may need to explain better to them the difference between the annual and premium memberships.

I understand they are different, but I can’t tell what the difference is myself. Could you explain them a bit more?

Are they complementary or mutually exclusive? Are they both subscriptions or are you selling with one-time payments so they renew manually?

I imagine the single issues are one-time payments.

I have 3 levels for a magazine site – buy this issue, annual and premium.

How are you selling these currently? levels, custom capabilities, or a mix?

First. It’s not a question of explaining these when they make the purchase because everyone forgets. So they need to be reminded.

An annual membership is what is says but a premium gives them additional articles which are not part of the annual subscription because the articles are more complex and require an interest level/familiarity with the subject over and above the normal reader. e.g. an article about widgets is available to the annual subscriber but an article on the widget market in China is only available to premium subscribers.

The subscriptions to these two levels are catered for in a dual way: by making a choice at the beginning to subscribe to one service and then another and also by way of upgrade – e.g. converting one level of subscription to another. They are both subscriptions.

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How are you selling these currently? levels, custom capabilities, or a mix? No they are levels – there is no custom capability that I am using here because to do so would require me to code each article which I don’t want to do. I can assign a category with a restriction qualification and that’s all I need to do in the current set-up.

Thanks.

Okay, so Premium is the Annual + more content, right? In that case, Annual can be Level 1 and Premium Level 2 (which includes access to Level 1 content). The individual issues can be sold as custom capabilities.

Custom capabilities can only be sold with one-time, buy-now transactions. Levels can be sold that way too, but can be sold as subscriptions too. Users can have only one subscription at a time, so it’d not be possible to have the user subscribe to Annual and add a second subscription for the Premium extra, it’d be one or the other, although Premium can include access to teh content in Annual.

If the user has the Annual subscription and tries to open a Premium content, he’ll be sent to the Membership Options Page, which seems to be where the confusion arises, because they are already subscribed, although to the lower one. You’d need to use conditionals there to customize the explanation the user gets, based on his level and the level required for the content he was trying to view. It’d be the same when it’s a single issue, you’d need to customize the message.

[hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals[/hilite]
[hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Advanced PHP Conditionals[/hilite]
[hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Membership Options Page Variables (MOP Vars)[/hilite]

I hope that helps. :)