At present, the OFN platform doesn’t have a clear way of handling membership fees. A lot of CSAs and hubs are ‘members only’ and OFN can of course be set up for members only - but if there is a fee required - how are people handling this?
The only thing I can think of is to add ‘membership’ as a product. But the enterprise manager still has to look at each order to make sure they paid the membership before giving them access to the shop. Plus - if the product sticks in the shop, some members forget and buy it twice and have to be re-funded. In addition - most membership-driven programs, esp cooperatives, want to collect some information from people beyond what is completed at checkout, and give them a member number…
Anyone have work-a-rounds? How important is this - should we be putting a wishlist item together?
Cooperative on the Norwegian platform use 2 shopfronts and tagging
1 public shopfront with the membership(s) as products
1 private shopfront with the coop’s products
This of course involves manually watching the membership shopfront and adding to the customer list of the private shopfront. I think it works quite well.
This could of course be much more automated and solved with a membership feature, but that’s another wishlist
This seems simple enough using tags: just tag “members” users, and put a condition to display only some products (or even the whole shop), or apply other fees , depending on the tag being there or not.
You can then either sell the membership as a product online to non members, or manage it offline and add the tag manually.
yes - if the only difference between a member and non-member is the membership fee, or just a few products/variants, then tagging what you don’t want to show and do want to show for members works. Thanks @berteh. You are correct. But tagging lots of things in a shop with hundreds of products is kind of a pain. Second - yes, its possible to tag a whole OC. BUT again - this is awkward until we make some further improvements in OFN - because when you go to set up an OC, its very difficult (if there are lot of products in incoming) to figure out which ones go into which (member vs non-member OC) - because at this screen , you only see product name and size - not price (which is often the difference between member vs non-member). So it can be done - but is finicky. So - yes - your suggestions are how to handle it - but sometimes it just doesn’t feel that easy for users - i was hoping to learn about an option I haven’t figured out. Cheers.
you are indeed right @tschumilas. My additional problem with the “tagging” approach is that is does not account for the anniversary of the user subscription, when I need to ask for renewal.
Since we operate all year long, new users can join at any time, for a whole calendar year… and membership´s gotta be renewed after a year. But most other CSAs operate on a season base, so I didn’t want to elaborate.
We would love to see membership management for CLFC as well, but that’s a pretty major feature to add in. A good one, but I’m not sure it’s widely enough needed to become high priority.
The solution I’m looking at is a bit old school/manual, using a completely independent database so we would be able to import our existing memberships without data loss. I’m going to be presenting OFN to our BoD next month, to discuss moving our entire operation from Open Food Source … and I know this is going to be a question. But at least I have an interim solution, even if it’s a kludge.
Membership fees could easily be handled outside OFN.
A short term integration hack could be to use Zapier to link with your database directly.
Longer term an API endpoint could handle the integration.
I don’t feel like this is a complex feature - just a big one for OFN to handle. Hence I think doing this outside OFN is a better move for the foreseeable future.
Hey @CLFC - do you know Zapier - or could become OFN-CAN’s Zapper? I think there’d be many customizations we could do - as @lin_d_hop is doing in the US. I think we could engage users in paying for these too - so I’m wondering about having a ‘go to’ Zapper to contract with. @lauriewayne1 - do you think we might work toward having a NA Zapper to work with on customized zaps?
No, I’ve never used Zapier. Looks like something like IFTTT (IF This Then That) though, which I’ve used to build things like internet connected, voice controlled TV remotes. Looks a bit limited though, without paying for a premium account.
It’s something I could look into learning, but I don’t have any experience with it at this time.
If you are a non-profit and put their logo on your website you can get a free first tier premium account.
UK ties our business model to Zaps. When we outgrow this plan it will be well worth us paying for the next tier.
Good to know @lin_d_hop. I didn’t spot that when I was looking at their site, but I’ll do a little digging to find the T&C on that.
EDIT: Okay, I did some digging, and found their non-profit discount page here: https://zapier.com/non-profits/ … but it’s only 15% off the paid plans with proof of status. Where did you find the free plan with website logo offer?
fyi @CLFC - Brandy @MSFutureFarm and @lauriewayne1 are also looking to do this Zap link for the US. If we can’t find a free plan - maybe we can do a US-CAN account and share things? I think OFN-CAN could pay for that. I imagine that we will be wanting to do the same kind of things. Maybe that won’t work - and we have to have our own account though. But at least we can learn it together.
Hey @sigmundpetersen - this is the way I’m setting up a shop now - public shopfront/OC, and tagged members only OC. (moving members to the members only as they buy memberships). I want the members prices to be less. So - just checking - there is no way to enter a negative, discounted fee in OFN is there? (at least I don’ t think I can get it to work). So - persumably, I would have different enterprise fees - say one at 30% for the public shop and one at 20% (so 10% lower markup) for the members shop. Is this what you are doing on the Norwegian platform? (Nice side advantage of separate OC that I didn’t realize before - is that you can download a csv of shoppers just for that OC - so can get a members list to export and keep updated in mailchimp.)
