Register for EFT online?
Any plans for this? We would love it. I found an older thread where you stated:
"Memberships don't make sense online IMO. Customers wouldn't want to pay for a membership that activated immediately (they aren't there to use it thus they are wasting days). Alternately why would they want to spend money before they even visited for a future membership?
Gift memberships makes sense, hence online gift cards will be supported."
However, with clever use of the email system management, this feature would be very valuable when targeting existing customers that are likely to jump on an eft membership when included in a promotion.
Thoughts?
Comments
I don't have short term plans to add this as direct functionality. There are so many what-ifs-and-complications with recurring bills (contracts, etc.) that it would become very nasty and very cumbersome fast.
That being said, LOTS of gyms use the booking system to sell prepaid memberships online. It works great - they have an offering for each type of membership. The "event date" is the membership start date. Staff just look for new bookings for these offerings to complete the membership configurations.
Here is one such example: https://www.senderoneclimbing.com/product/annual-membership/
You can easily use this to sell EFT memberships, perhaps about asking for some amount of prepayment ($50, etc?) to weed out the lookyloos. Then when the customer arrives, you just collect the recurring billing information and billing contract.
Thanks for the link to Sender One's site. Definitely works with term memberships, but a little clunky for EFT.
What about using Stripe's capabilities for this? (https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/guide)
Imagine a sweet promo video about how amazing monthly membership at xyz climbing gym is and then BAM, clickable link to instantly sign up at the appropriate pro-rated or even discounted amount, etc...
Stripe does have a "subscription" system, but that doesn't mean you want to have two recurring billing systems running in parallel. That would be a nightmare for you and your staff to know where each customer lives.
I really think that this can be done very simply... offer it online with the booking system with a $X non-refundable deposit towards whatever membership deal you are doing. And when the customer comes in capture the billing details. Not sure what's clunky about that? The customers may want to pay with ACH draft (if you do that, for example) and that can all be handled when the customer arrives for their membership.
Simple is good. And trying to communicate prorated first payments, billing cycles, etc. all online will just be confusing.
I also think if you start signing people up online with recurring billing details and start autobilling them each month without them showing up at the gym you are going to get angry customers and inevitably some nasty chargebacks.
Capture the intent online, with a small financial commitment, and then follow up with the billing details. That's my suggestion.
Hope this helps
Andy
Just found SenderOne is doing exactly what I describe above... :)
https://www.senderoneclimbing.com/product/annual-membership/
https://www.senderoneclimbing.com/product/mtm/
Thanks Andy.
Please sign in to leave a comment.