Memberships – with WooCommerce (Paid Addon)

WPAdverts Memberships extension allows charging users a membership fee for posting a set number of postings while the membership is active.

Required Plugins

The WooCommerce based memberships require a couple of additional plugins. Aside from WPAdverts and WooCommerce, you will need:

1. WPAdverts WooCommerce Integration – these plugin allows charging users for Ad postings using WooCommerce checkout
2. WooCommerce Memberships (from $149) – this plugin allows configuring membership packages for WooCommerce
3. (optionally) WooCommerce Subscriptions (from $199) – if you want the subscriptions to be automatically renewed then the Subscriptions plugin will allow you to do that.
4. WPAdverts Memberships – this plugin connects WPAdverts with WC Memberships.

The 1 and 4 you can get in our Pro Bundle, while the WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions you will need to purchase separately from the WooCommerce.com extensions store if you do not have them yet.

If you do not have any of the extensions yet then, unfortunately, this might turn out to be a quite costly set-up. The total you need to spend in order to get all the plugins is around $500.

The Setup

There are a couple of steps required to set up the Memberships with WPAdverts and WooCommerce.

Creating WooCommerce Products

To walk you through the setup lets pretend we want to have a membership which will allow the user with an active membership to post 5 featured ads visible 30 days and to additionally have 20 active normal ads visible for 30 days.

The first step is to create some WPAdverts WooCommerce products from wp-admin / Products / Add New panel. It could be the following:

• Featured Ad – visible 30 days and marked as featured
• Standard – visible 30 days

How to do that you can read in WPAdverts WooCommerce integration documentation.

Note that for this step having the WPAdverts WooCommerce integration installed and activated as only then you will be able to create a product with “Product Type“: “Single Listing (WPAdverts)” or “Renew Listing (WPAdverts)“.

Configuring Products Availability

The products you created in the last step can be purchased by anyone as one-time postings. We need to convert them into packages. You need to have the WPAdverts Memberships extension to do that.

You can do that from wp-admin / Classifieds / Options / Memberships / Pricing panel. How to configure the pricings you can read in WPAdverts Memberships (with Payments Module) documentation in the “Configuration” section.

The main difference between WooCommerce and Payments Module mode is that in WC version the access to pricings will be granted based on user membership so you do not need to configure the “Capabilities” section, just check the “read” capability to make sure only registered users will see pricings.

Following our example. You will want the following configuration for the Ads:

• Featured Ad: “Max Uses”: 5; “Interval”: 30, “Capabilities”: read, “Post Status”: select all.
• Standard: “Max Uses”: 20; “Interval”: 30, “Capabilities”: read, “Post Status”: “Published”

Note the “Post Status” in case of Featured Ad applies to all Adverts as we want a user to post no more than 5 Ads so we need to count published, trashed and expired Ads during last 30 days. If we would limit the “Post Status” to only “Published” then a user could post 5 ads then expire or trash them and post additional 5 ads during the same period. That would be a total of 10 postings.

Configuring Memberships

As far as WPAdverts integration is concerned this is pretty much it. The next step is to configure the membership packages using the WooCommerce Memberships plugin.

The complete documentation for WooCommerce Memberships you can find here, as far as WPAdverts integration is concerned the most important part is Membership Plans creation.

When configuring a plan in “Membership Plan Data” box in “Restrict Products” section make sure to select at least one of the products we created in previous steps. Then when a user will purchase a membership plan he will see these products in Listing field when creating an Ad from a page with [adverts_add] shortcode.

Purchasing a Plan

Your users will also need some way to purchase the Membership Plans (unless you are planning to assign them manually).

The easiest way to do that is to create a new WooCommerce product from wp-admin / Products / Add New panel in Memberships / Restrict Content section and add a membership plan you want users to get access to when purchasing this product.

For more advanced membership purchase configuration please refer to the WooCommerce Memberships documentation.

Integration with Subscription

If you would like to allow your users to have recurring paid memberships then you can do that by installing a WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

For more details on what the WC Subscriptions can do for your membership site please refer to the WooCommerce Memberships Subscriptions Integration guide.

Recap

Using WPAdverts Memberships with WooCommerce requires quite a lot of plugins (compared to other extensions we have) so let’s quickly recap what do you need to set up memberships site.

The plugins:

WPAdverts, WooCommerce, WPAdverts WooCommerce Integration, WooCommerce Memberships, WPAdverts Memberships, (optional but recommended) WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Set up

• from wp-admin / Products / Add New panel create at least one product with “Product Type” set to “Single Listing (WPAdverts)“.
• in wp-admin / Classifieds / Options / Memberships / Pricing panel configure how many times the product can be used in a set period of time and how to calculate the usage.
• from wp-admin / WooCommerce / Memberships / Membership Plans / Add New create a membership plan which will grant access to a previously created products – use the Restrict Products input for this.
• allow users to purchase your membership plan, you can do that by creating new WC product and granting access to membership plan on purchase.