Monetization
I'm posting this in the hope that I'm missing something fundamental from the Fluent Community Pro plugin. 🤞
I just bought the lifetime deal, but from what I can gather, there's no easy way of selling memberships or courses without using yet another plugin or software platform (this is a basic requirement of every community, in my opinion).
I've tried the free Stripe option in Fluent Forms, and I've tried going down the webhook route using another platform (that I already pay for) to manage the sales - without success.
Fluent Forms lets you create a form, but then there doesn't appear to be a way of using it inside Fluent Community (can't use shortcodes in the 'Lock Screen' section - it displays 'blocked' message whenever you navigate to it). Apparently the 'landing page' option in will work but that's only if I upgrade to Fluent Forms Pro!
It appears that the only (simple) way of selling is to buy yet more software, and likely from WP Manage Ninja?
Has anyone else hit this problem?
Do you have anything now that processes payments? ThriveCart, email landing page from MailChimp or Kit, something like that?
What's the other platform you mentioned?
In any case, you can create a Registration page on your WordPress site or anywhere else and reference from the default login screen as of the most recent update.
Take a look at the attached screenshot. I'm using a WordPress page, but you could link this out to another sales page.
Now the issue you have next is how to provision the user account and add the new member to spaces or courses. That could end up using webhooks or Zapier. I'm using Fluent Forms Pro because I already have it and everything works well on my server. The payment processing with Stripe is mostly invisible to the user.
William Beem Thanks for that, William - it's helpful.
Yes, I use Kit as my sales platform, connected via Stripe - so ideally, I'd have liked to have used that and then connected to FC Pro for provisioning - which would be clunky I suspect, especially when needing to also manage the reverse, for churn.
I'm disappointed it's not a native feature of the FC Pro plugin, however, it seems I just need to fork out another purchase for FF Pro!
So, do you use FF Pro for membership sales, and if so, does it manage canceled subscriptions automatically? (i.e. revoking 'Space' access if a subscriber unsubscribes from a paid Space)
Thanks again!
John Bellingham following because I’m in the same boat. I have all Pro versions.
Erin Wright Interested to hear how you go with your setup, Erin!
I'm using FF Pro for payment. You can build it with Stripe or another payment provider to handle a subscription for recurring payments.
In order to handle cancelations, I think you need to use the free version of FluentCRM because it has automation features to handle triggers from Fluent Community and their other plugins.
I'm not there yet, as I'm still building my community site and haven't started selling to members. Those are all good points to consider.
You should be able to do this with a webhook from Kit as an action. Someone cancels in your Kit sales system. Build a workflow in it and add an Action, select Webhook as the type, and then enter the webhook you built in FluentCommunity to process. You can create a webhook that can add/remove from Spaces or add/remove from courses.
I found this page that discusses the process on the Kit side of things.
This is helpful, William - thanks for sharing.
It feels like this community build will take me slightly longer than I'd originally hoped!
John Bellingham Yes, that's true. I'm running into an API error when I configured and tested my Stripe webhook with Fluent Forms.
There are triggers for FluentCRM when a subscription starts or ends. That's good for access management, though there are a few other triggers that could come to mind.
I may want to have some public areas and some paid private areas. However, I'm also wondering about cases where you may suspend someone for a period if they break the rules.
Still detemining the workflow that I want.
As for me, I hate complicated setups. I moved from Aweber with over 10k subscribers to fluentcrm. This is to keep my setup in sync. Currently, I'm using WooCommerce for handling payments that's because I'm still confused about which to choose between Fluentform and Paymattic. I just hope Fluent-Community makes everything available instead of patching different plugins to make the system work.
Bryan William Yes, agreed... the fewer moving parts, the better. Hopefully, a simpler payment solution will be developed natively into the FC plugin.
John Bellingham Yes I hope so too. They can also integrate paymattic so that the payment landing page that's connected to the locked screen will still carry the header and footer of fluent community. That way everything will look native.
Right now, on my woo-commerce payment page, I simply removed the header and footer. The moment theme compatibility is out, I will bring back the header/footer of fluentcommunity to it.
I think this is a necessary feature for community platform, and I decided to mention it. Not only selling memberships, it needs the other Monetization options too; like injecting ads (google ads) and promotion for community posts (Sponsored post). So we can add it in feature request section.
dariush Oja I can see a need for ads in an open board discussion.
will azon press (it's part of the fluent family?) work for the ads here?