There is no current method on Vin65 that allows for renewing a prepaid club member. We have tried to create a system that works around this, by adding a secondary membership to the member, to keep their annual benefits, and renewing them via that club, the annual charge. The issue we have is that not every club member fits into that cookie cutter mold of signing up in January and renewing the following January. Our club is quarterly and if we renew them in January, they will miss the December shipment. If we renew them by quarter, there are some who may have signed up in January, but didn’t want December and therefore wouldn’t be due for a renewal until March. or, if a club member for example, has needed to skip 3 of the 4 shipments they paid for, does not qualify for renewal because there’s still 3 shipments they haven’t accepted, how will I know this, unless I go into each member individually and scrutinize their account. I cannot wrap my head around this one and there isn’t enough information downloaded in the spreadsheets to know which ones these are without going into each club member individually, and honestly, we don’t have the staff to manage each club member individually. Does anyone have any ideas how to work with this problem?
@amanda, my club setup fell into a similar situation when I started this in January, with a few key differences.
I’ll get this part out of the way first: I think allowing prepaid members to skip shipments is really not going to work, ever. Especially if you can’t manage them on an individual level.
Frequently pushing back a customer’s renewal date? Sounds pretty rough. If you don’t have the staff to handle it I personally would find a way to phase that out totally. A club needs structure and consistency. Offer the non-prepaid memberships (that Vin65 is really geared for) with the same shipping schedule and, and you can still just click “skip” in club processing if you really want to let people skip 75% of a year’s shipments. Which leads me too…
You might need to start offering more substitutions, red only/dry only, or something else to get people to stop wanting to skip shipments. With our prepaid members we do put in the effort to allow people who are on vacation or can’t receive a shipment for some reason to have it held for pickup or to have it combined with a later shipment. Using Vin65’s contact tasks & order tasks this is really not much of a hassle.[quote=“amanda, post:1, topic:701”]
a club member for example, has needed to skip 3 of the 4 shipments they paid for, does not qualify for renewal because there’s still 3 shipments they haven’t accepted
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They paid for it, make them want it and make them take it! You are bending over backwards to make your club work, but they need to participate too. You deserve it.
Now is where I emphatically agree, in Vin65 offers no way at all, really, to renew a prepaid membership. I was opening the page with member details and copying to create a new club with identical details, and then deleting the old club. When you have shipping overrides and club notes and other details to transfer the process is not reasonable. I don’t love the idea of adding a second club, but I can see why you have it setup that way.
Prior to launching my first Prepaid club membership, I thought this all through as well.
The simplest way I was able to structure it was to have the Prepaid club membership be on it’s own calendar essentially.
In other words, our Prepaid club membership is, for example, from September 2017 to September 2018. We gave our customers a 30-day window to signup for the Prepaid membership and advised when their first order will be going out.
Before the last month of our Prepaid “club year”, we will open up Prepaid Club signups/renewals again for just another 30-days. That way everyone in the prepaid membership is on the same schedule.
Offering just a 30-day window for prepaid club signups rallied in a ton of members which, I’m guessing, being due to there being a bit of urgency involved.
That’s the best that I’ve come up with, yet I know it wouldn’t exactly work for everyone but, that was my solution.