[Wishlist] Gift a membership Answered
See first comment for an immediate solution.
1) The problem → Could be related to team/licensing, but if a member wants to buy the first year membership for another user, they'd have to sign up, hand over the login details, and then ask them to swap out the credit card info.
2) Why is this important → This is low on the priority list for me personally, but something it'd be great to have eventually. MasterClass.com's buy one gift one has been hugely successful for them and is what got me to subscribe — I'd like to be able to offer the same thing.
3) What's your plan B → Tell users to create an account and then hand over log in details.
4) Possible solutions we could build for you → Ability to purchase 2 licenses where one is sent to the receiver of the gift to activate their account with a discount pre-applied.
Comments
13 comments
Happy Wednesday! I'm happy to report that I just finished a tutorial which explains how to accomplish this 🎉
It's MemberScript #68 and requires a Make.com account. Hopefully we can use this as a prototype for a native (no integrations required) solution 🤞
We are not planning to solve this problem immediately, but this could change in response to your feedback.
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We need similar feature. The exist user enters the email of the person they want to receive the gift, and pays for the first year of that subscription. From next year, system will ask them to update there card.
Hey Abid, thank you for the comment 🙏
We prioritize our roadmap at the very end or very beginning of each Q. I will make a post first thing next year with a list of the features we hope to build. I’m not sure yet if we will be able to get a gifting feature into the product in the next 3 months
Corey Haines Yes! Thank you for this.
One way to think of this... it's like the purchaser is putting money into an account they "Start" for the recipient, or they are putting that money into a virtual giftcard which can be redeemed as a credit. The purchaser's payment method would b eused to generate the credit, but would never be associated with the recipient's account. The recipient would need to put their own payment method on file when the credit is used up.
I'll dig into the MasterClass.com example and let you know if I have any follow up questions. Thank you!
Duncan from Memberstack Yes exactly! I really would love to do this, although again it's not high priority on the list compared to other items.
To save you some time on MasterClass research, here are some screenshots for how it works:
Here's another example of how SubStack does it (applicable for anyone who's using Memberstack for a paid newsletter): https://theprofile.substack.com/subscribe?gift=true
Feedback from Kamel Bentot - "Gift cards would be an amazing feature. Giving possibilities to our customers the options to buy a gift card and send it as a present or to themselves would be amazing. I have a lot of my clients who require/request gift cards."
Gift Cards
The problem → I want members to be able to buy gift cards for other people.
Why is this important → It's a great source of revenue!
What's your plan B → Ask customers to Venmo their friend X dollars or ask the customer to buy the membership in their friend's name.
https://launchgiftcards.com/... they have some bad reviews though...
Related to Gift a membership
Found a solution with https://www.giftup.com/
If we want gift memberships to be true gifts rather than marketing vehicles, it would be good to tie this in with the concept of automatically-expiring free memberships (similar to auto-expiring one-time paid memberships).
For me, there are a couple of issues with making the recipient go through Stripe: Using coupons in Stripe (e.g., Giftup) only covers the full membership cost with subscriptions, not with one-off purchases. Also getting the recipient to enter their own credit card to redeem a gift feels scammy. And signing them up for an auto-renewing membership on their own credit card and calling it a 'gift' also feels yuck. A lot of my gift-givers would be like, grandma gifting a membership to a grandkid. So I don't really want strings attached for the recipient.
But at the same time, the gift membership should start when the recipient actually wants to activate it, not when the gifter purchases it. So setting up the free membership at the same time as gift purchase (e.g., through Zapier or whatever) doesn't really work either. The only way I can do it would be a whole bunch of manual mucking about.
What would be amazing is if the gifter could make the purchase, and this generates a gift code (from MS) which could be used (through MS) once to validate a free membership signup (let's say it's auto-expiring, because I'm full of wishes). This way only the gifter has to go through Stripe. MS gets their cut. Recipient can sign up without mummy's credit card. :)
With a few tweaks I could also see this working for organizations (e.g., schools) purchasing multiple seats/memberships for their team (and save a whole other bunch of manual mucking around).
+1 Gifting memberships would be huge for my use case, would love this feature!
Dean Gray : I'm planning on using a couple of Memberscripts (#27 and #37) to make this work in a rudimentary way: I can use #27 to give members a one-time date when they first sign in, and I can use #37 to make that specific free membership expire after 12 months. It works nicely as a gift membership because the one-time date clock only starts ticking when they first sign in — so people can purchase it ahead of time (so long as they resist the temptation to sign in to check it out first).
I'm still going to be manually creating the free memberships and assigning usernames/passwords, but it'll work until we get something better.
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