We have a community with thought leader and pros (making up about 5% of the population) and regular members (95%). We want a tool that will allow us to create a sort of marketplace where members can sign up as a member with specific pros, and then be granted access to that pro’s private group, and the pros could manage the memberships.
To further complicate things, I want to set it up so we retain a small percentage. e.g. We keep ~30% and also absorb the standard $.30 + 2.9% fees so the pro gets 70%.
I’ve seen a few plugins that deal with allowing people to make donations or to pay you one-time or recurring subscription fees.
These are fantastic tools (except maybe that last one ) But I don’t see any that could work for a marketplace/commission type of subscription model.
So the simple answer to my question is probably… it doesn’t exist. Go to the marketplace?
But I have another followup question which is about a slightly different workflow…
I’m also using Wordpress for our website. I’m using the “Multivendor Marketplace” tool with woocommerce. It’s incredibly powerful and allows me to retain comissions on products/services that members buy.
Would the right path to persue be to get the membership created and managed on that side, and have someone do some custom dev to provision new groups or link members to groups in Discourse, which would then grant access into these private groups?
(and this is may be a dumb question but just to confirm… If I do have private groups, we’ll also need to create categories that these groups have access to and the “category” is where the discussions go down. right?)
Another feature that is available to groups is that personal messages can be sent to all group members. This is especially useful for customer support type scenarios.
It’s hard to know what the best approach would be for your case, but managing group memberships, payments, and commissions from WordPress would definitely be possible. This would be easiest to do if your WordPress site is the SSO provider for your Discourse site. Our WordPress plugin can be used to enable SSO between WordPress and Discourse. It also makes a few functions available that can be used by developers for managing Discourse group membership.
Yeah, I haven’t done it myself, but after reading the docs for the WP-Discourse plugin, I noted I’d use WordPress for all the commerce, subscription management, and membership tiers, and would push changes over to Discourse to move users between groups.
Thanks so much for this response. I think I have already installed those bits that you just mentioned. Glad for the affirmation to work these memberships from the WordPress side.
) But I don’t see any that could work for a marketplace/commission type of subscription model.