Participants database with WooCommerce

  • I have reviewed the forums and there are several similar situations to what I am facing however the solutions are not clear.

    We run a Club where members sign up and receive various benefits. These benefits will be allocated (made available) to different levels of membership using WooCommerce Memberships plugin. We have four levels of membership, each being charged at a different rate. What I need to establish for promotional purposes, goods delivery and billing purposes is a database to manage the membership register. The unique identifier needs to be a number assigned to the member which becomes their user name. What I am seeking is the provision of the facility where the form provided for a new user populates both the database that holds member records and provides the information necessary to ship the items and complete the transaction. Associated with this is when a member signs in to make a purchase, they will not be required to enter the delivery details – merely confirm that they correct.
    To clarify one point that may not be evident – if a person is not a member and not going to pay a subscription to get the member benefits, they may transact but to do so must provide their basic information – that is, they get joined as a member at the lowest level for zero payment and get access to the goods/services at less advantageous rates/conditions than do members – hence the requirement for Memberships. This allows us to market to them as past customers.

    I have been looking at Participants database which seems to provide the membership functionality being sought but I am unclear on how they react and integrate with WooCommerce when transactions are undertaken. What I am seeking is to avoid a member having to re-enter standing information more than once.

    I hope I have explained what I am seeking succinctly – can anyone give me assistance?

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/participants-database/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    I understand the issues involved in a setup like this, I have done several client jobs that involves dealing with two database plugins like this, both with WooCommerce and others.

    WooCommerce Memberships is a very powerful plugin that also keeps a database of members. Each member is actually a WordPress user with additional fields (it is just an extension of WooCommerce). It is probably possible to do everything you want to do with just that one plugin.

    The advantage of using both Participants Database and WooCommerce Memberships lies in using Participants Database to manage all the member data with its more flexible data handling and forms generation.

    The basic approach is to use the WooCommerce Memberships user database for basic login and identifying info only, then all other member data is managed by Participants Database. This is fairly complicated to set up because all of your user-facing forms must incorporate interactions with both databases. Participants Database uses an API that gives you several ways to interact with it’s database, and so does WooCommerce Memberships, so the hooks are there.

    The problem in assisting you is that there are a lot of ways to implement a setup like this, I won’t be able to give you much in the way of specifics. To give you an idea of the scale of the task, this part of the job ended up being at least 12 hours of billable time in each case due to the complexity of the UI and backend interactions.

    What I suggest you do is start by designing all your user interactions using paper mockups. It can be very confusing and inefficient to do the coding if you don’t have all of this worked out beforehand. Once you know how you want all the user interactions to work, you can set up the database fields and then the forms and their interactions with the databases. Typically, Participants Database would be treated as a “slave” database, because Participants Database does not handle basic housekeeping like logins and financial transactions.

    If you don’t have strong WordPress coding skills at your disposal, I would suggest not going this route and instead handle everything with WooCommerce Memberships only. You’ll still need to code, but it will be much more straightforward.

    Thread Starter wandergolf

    (@wandergolf)

    Thank you for the reply – it did clarify a few things.

    I think the real issue I have is capturing full membership details as I want them at the time they are purchasing a membership and ensuring members are identified by their unique identifier. If we use Participants to be the entry point to interface with purchasing membership products will it work?

    The flow is :
    A visitor decides they wish to purchase one of the memberships and clicks on the “purchase” button. The form requesting membership detail – name, address, tele, email, delivery address …….. comes up and when completed and “Next”, the membership product is loaded into the Woo shopping cart, and the details captured populate the cart fields. The purchase is made and the form loads into the Participate database.

    Within Woo is the transaction record that has the membership purchase which is then used by Memberships in the stuff it does.

    For a purchase to be made within the shop, there is a sign-in requirement. Two options here – if a member, enter username/password and access shop – if a non-member click here and a form comes up that they complete (registration process) When they “Next’ it purchases a casual membership ($0 value) and signs them into the shop (prices/products restrictions governed through Memberships) and the form details populate Participants and sets membership type to Casual. They then get sign in details for their next visit.

    Question – will Participants do this and where are the issues?

    Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    Participants Database can do it, given the coding skills to set it up. It will be complicated because most of your user interactions will need to involve both plugins.

    I would say that unless Participants Database is providing you with features you can’t get through WooCommerce Memberships it’s not worth the effort. With the memberships plugin, you can add custom fields, so you can collect all the data you need for your members without using another plugin for that.

    Thread Starter wandergolf

    (@wandergolf)

    OK – I will just have to work out how to add fields to Memberships

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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