Downloadable products w/price for non members, same products free to paid members

[Tod King]

Ok, if this is something that has been asked a million times please forgive, I have been looking and cant seem to find it. My question has a few factors to take into consideration. I am building a site that will have templates and e-books and scripts for a cost, this is nothing new been done a million times, the twist (and I hope it can be achieved without to much problem) is that there will also be the option to by a membership which would give them unlimited downloads for the year. I was thinking of going with OSC  for all this but would still be asking the same questions. ran across mambo-phpShop and fell in love with the idea, because it will be mostly a users group if all goes right, so what better way then to start with mambo! now I have been playing with it a little and the first thing that I have a huge problem with is the first e-mail gave me the address to the file, I clicked on it and it started to download,- without asking me for my download access code, now I am sure that this is  an over site on my part that is addressed in the manual (I hope)

Something else that I would like to ask is: we will also be having free products, which need no e-mail to download, but I don't want it to be available unless they at least sign up as a free member, when I was looking over the admin section I noticed that it can be used for a just a catalog, is there an option to use it for both?

I am sure that there will be a moderator reading this, and to you I say if all this easily achieved then forgive me, if all this will take some heavy hacks then maybe we need to speak about your costs for help.

Thank you so much, keep up the good work.

Post edited by: trickydigit, at: 2004/11/11 20:21

[Danny Locksmith]

HI.
Some of the things you want to do are easy.
FREE downloads, to members only is simple.
A page wich can only be accessed by members is core mambo stuff. Just put links on it!
Also, you can create member groups.
You could create a group of all the people who have paid an annual subscription. You would have to maintain this group yourself iI think. Adding people who pay and removing people who had not renewed. This group get access to a special set of pages.

Using this method, the thing you would sell in your shop is the annual subscription! All of the product download pages would be simple static content pages accessible from a members only menu!

PAYPAL and several other payment systems handle subscriptions.
I bet that there is some clever person reading this who knows how to make the user group management automatic too, so you can just sit back and count hte money!

[Tod King]

Yes Thank you for your input, I  only cringe at the fact that having to put the link to the \" members only part\" in mambo has me redoing some 2000 templates, which already has me crying at the input for the shop.

[Tod King]

ok so maybe this would work, could I have two instalations of  mambo php shop? one which has all the prices to the products for the non members and one that is in the members only are, so that the data base could be copied to the second instalation and then the prices  were free?

[Danny Locksmith]

You can have one installation
You can have all of the products in the shop. With  individual prices.
You can also have restricted pages, only available to members in a certain group. These could list the products which are free to the members of that group.

SO, a page of products free to all members
A page of products which are free only to members who have paid subscriptions etc

A customer HAS to register to purchase at all.
So he will also be able to log in and see free materials.

[tom]

dlocksmith wrote:

You can also have restricted pages, only available to members in a certain group.

How is this achieved? Where to you set access to product pages for specific shopper groups?

Also, i have in every product setup page that the shopper group is default. Can this be changed??

Cheers, Tom