If you don’t have a paid membership site yet, you might not yet know the big picture about how are you going to take payments, how people are going to get access to the content, and how are you going to be taking even more payments month after month, and I want to explain to you the components of taking payments on membership sites and the exact process somebody goes through when they purchase from you.
So, here’s what happens. Somebody goes to a webpage of yours, it’s called a sales letter. This is where you convince people why your membership site is so good and why they should give you a chance. They click on a button. Let’s just say that you’re taking PayPal payments. They click on a PayPal button, they get sent to PayPal, they go and either log in to their PayPal account or enter their credit card details manually. Then they click on the finish button and they get sent back to your site. At this point, they have paid this third party provider – in this case, PayPal – and now, they are on the registration page for your site. Now, they can fill out their username, first and last name, email address, and password. At this point, their email address and first and last name are already filled out for them. It’s up to them to figure out what username they want, which usually is just the first and last name, and what password to put in, which they’ll just put in twice. After they fill out their username and password, they’ll click the “next” button and get logged to the membership site, and now, they have instant acces. They also get an email, a confirmation email, where they can pick up and get their username and password at a later date, so they can now log in at any time.
So, the key to that is that they went through what’s called a payment processor. They were on your site, they were on the sales letter, they clicked over and left your site, went to PayPal, processed the card, then got redirected back to your site, at which point PayPal said, “It’s okay. They’ve paid,” and the membership software handles that. So, this second part of it is called the integration. After you set up your membership software, they’ll usually give you instructions, step-by-step instructions, on how to create what’s called a payment button in PayPal. You log in to your PayPal account, generate a button people can click on and just copy and paste this directly to your webpage. You follow about three simple steps, and if you add in certain codes and numbers, so that when somebody pays you money, the information gets passed back to the membership software that says, “Okay. They bought this particular product from the membership site. They joined this particular level in the membership site.” So, that integration allows membership software to process the payment and say, “Okay. They paid this through PayPal, now what do they have access to?”
The final component of the membership payment site integration is called the IPN or Instant Payment Notification. All this means is that if somebody cancels their monthly subscription or they refund their one-time payment, it will cut off user’s access to that thing they paid for. So basically when you set your payment button, using the instructions your membership site software gave, it will notify that membership software if somebody cancels PayPal, will do the notification on its own. So that way, even somebody cancels your site, even logged into their PayPal account, PayPal will hit your script, will contact your membership software directly, and it will say, “This guy right here cancelled his access.”
So, those are the three steps in taking payments for your membership site. First, involve a third party payment processor like PayPal. Second, involve membership software, such as Wishlist member, to process the payment. And third, and this should be built in after you’ve created the button, is have what’s called IPN or Instant Payment Notification enabled in your PayPal account, so that if somebody cancels in PayPal, it will cancel their membership level access in your membership software.
Set up your membership site and start getting a recurring income today right now.