Memberships/Subscriptions Auto Upgrade

You should probably ask this on your membership/subscription plugin’s support channel, nobody here is going to know how to help you since you could be running any number of random membership plugins.

What plugin are you using?

Okay, you’re probably not going to like this reply, lol… Butttt, WHICH memberships and subscriptions plugins? There are literally HUNDREDS of subscription/membership plugins for woocommerce from dozens of authors.

Is it the plugins on woocommerce.com?

If so, I’m not 100% sure of all the features available in those 2 plugins, BUT I do know they have core features that could be manipulated to perform the task you’re seeking in a round-about sorta way… Like you can set the product discount on a per-membership-level basis (level-1 gets 10%, etc), so if you make 3 different plans at different prices – the only thing left is making the “upgrade” after a year automated. You can do that with a “dripped content” page, I would set it up as a tab in the “my account” page – after a year they would get access to the “level 2” page, which might just have a coupon code that they could use to discount the level-2 membership to be the same price as level-1 – giving them also the 20% discount (from the level-2 membership), all the user would have to do is follow the step by step membership upgrade page from their my-account page and include the coupon to keep the level-2 membership on-par with the same pricing they previously had. This would be the same setup for level-3 memberships.

The only downside to that setup is “what if a customer shares the coupon code with someone else and they upgrade their account early?”, if that were a valid concern (ppl actually did it) then you could set up a plugin that would automatically generate the coupons and email them to your members at the specified dates, Automatewoo does this:
https://www.sellwithwp.com/automate-woocommerce-member-coupons-with-automatewoo/

if going with the automated email system, you could skip the dripped-content coupon pages, and include simple instructions in the automatewoo email about how to apply the generated coupon to their subscription plan during subscription=upgrade (up/downgrading subscription levels is easy, so it should only be 3-4 steps for the user to follow in order to upgrade their plan for free using the automatewoo coupon).

It’s sort of an ugly method since it requires the user to click around their user-account a bit, I would say it should only take them 2-3 minutes of clicking to upgrade themselves, it would at least be fully automated for you 🙂

If I had the plugins it might be easier for me to figure a cleaner more automated solution, right now I’m just going off the documentation I see on the sales pages – and some past experience with those plugins.

If you’re using a different set of plugins the solution could be a lot easier/cleaner, I’m sure there are membership/subscription plugins already built that include this specific functionality, but if you’re going with official woocommerce.com extensions then at least there is this sort-of-easy solution.

“I should add that the pricing will not change… thats why we wouldn’t use the coupons…”

Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of making the upgrade page “drippable”, I was going off the idea that the member might have access to upgrading to “any” plan level, so to keep them from going from level 1 to level 3 there would be higher price for each membership level, and the coupon would be the thing that balanced the pricing once the member had reach year-1/year-2… Maybe you would want to allow access to the level-2/level-3 memberships if the subscription-cost-without-coupon was enough $$$ to make it worth giving them the % discounts for shopping? Then again you wouldn’t want someone buying a level-3 membership for 1 month just to get a 30% discount on one huge order, so maybe your method of “multi-year reward style membership” would work out best overall for your financials.

I guess if you can separate the pages for upgrading to different levels it would make more sense just to make those pages drippable at their respective dates, then no need for coupons.

Well, at least you have 2 different options for how to approach this problem now 🙂

Yeah that’s a bit of a pickle using the dripped upgrade page method.

It’s been too long since I used the membership plugin to know how much configuration can be done on the ‘expiring soon’ emails… Though I think we could get around that problem by not setting an expiry for the memberships – like they can just be month-to-month with the drippable upgrade page becoming available after a year – so there would be no expiration notice/email/problem… The only problem at that point is letting the member know about the drippable content they’d have access to after the 1 year mark… Doesn’t the plugin send emails to members when drippable content becomes available? If so that would take care of that – just edit the drippable content available email to tell them they “unlocked a free upgrade”.

Seems like with a content dripping feature alerting members about newly unlocked content would be a key feature, it has to be there right?

LoL sweet, yeah I’ll soak in the sun after I finish fixing all my client’s messed up Woocommerce 3.0.x sites haha 😀

Yeah, when you skipped over that part I hoped that was confirmation that they do indeed include a system for notifying members about newly unlocked content.

It seems like a no brainer as far as a feature to include in a dripped content plugin, have you purchased the plugins yet to confirm that there is such a feature?

Looking at their docs for memberships has some interesting stuff:
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-memberships/

Specifically the part about expired memberships and offering renewal links PLUS renewal with upgrade (so this part would take care of the “what if their membership expires before they can get to the upgrade page” thing that woo replied to you earlier).

Funnily enough, for automated “coupons” they also put links to the automatewoo plugin I had suggested, so I suppose the coupon method is still on the table unless we can figure out the email/notification about dripped content thing…

Check this out:
https://www.skyverge.com/blog/woocommerce-memberships-1-7/

Looks like they do have some configurable emails for fixed-date memberships, so configuring the email to be sent out before expiration with instructions on how to upgrade wouldn’t be a problem.

And check this out:
https://www.skyverge.com/blog/woocommerce-memberships-renew-with-a-different-plan/
Renewing a membership from their old plan to a new plan (presumably the next level).

Specifically for this last problem about notifying members about “new content”:
https://woocommerce.com/products/follow-up-emails/

it has a feature to send emails to customers that buy certain products or are subscribers, and it allows for time intervals, so it could easily be set up to notify members about the newly unlocked ‘dripped’ content, AKA the membership upgrade page.

Have fun reading about all THAT lol 🙂