The Subscriptions module gives you the ability to offer ad “packages” to your users. Instead of just buying one ad at a time, users can have many ads active at once (depending on how you define their packages). These packaged ads give users more flexibility to place multiple ads at once and have them all running at the same time. They can change these ads and continue to renew them all within the life of a single subscription. This is a great way to engage power users or offer bulk ad placement for high-value users.
Subscriptions is activated by going to the General → Settings → Modules → Subscriptions:
After checking the box to Allow Ad Subscriptions, two things will happen:
- Require registration is automatically activated if it wasn't already. Users will now need a 'membership' to post ads.
- You will now see a Subscription Plans link on the Classifieds menu. You can now add new subscriptions, or ways for users to buy ads in bulk.
First, let’s cover the Subscription Plans menu item.
Clicking on the menu will bring you to the Subscription plans screen, where you can create your first subscription plan:
To add a new plan, click Add Subscription Plan. Editing or deleting plans requires you to hover over the record you want, where the Edit and Delete links will appear. Editing a subscription shows the following screen:
The fields:
- Name is the display name of the plan shown to the users during payment if they buy a subscription plan instead of a single ad
- Description is internal, only displayed on the admin screen
- Price is the amount for the subscription
- Allowed Ad Count is the number of concurrent ads that can be placed under the subscription at a time. Once the limit is reached, no more ads can be posted, but the user can delete existing ads to post new ones if they like.
- Duration is the length of the subscription, not of the ads themselves. Duration says how long the subscription lasts. As long as the subscription is active, the user may have the Allowed Ad Count number of ads in the system for any duration they wish, up to the limit of the subscription expiration date.
- Featured Ads indicates whether the user’s subscription ads show up as Featured Ads when posted. This only works when you have the Featured Ads module installed at the same time as Subscriptions.
As subscriptions are purchased, under the Ad Management menu, you can see who purchased what by clicking on the Subscriptions link when you are an admin:
This gives you a listing of the owner of a subscription plan, along with current ad counts for that user/plan. A user can only have ONE subscription plan active at any time. You can manually add this to users using the “Add Subscription” button you see to the upper right, in the image above.
When the non-admin users are logged in, this same Ad Management->Subscriptions link is active for them as well, but will only display their subscription plan information, as well as their listings under the Listings link.
When you are placing an ad, Subscriptions modifies the initial payment screen options slightly:
Your users can buy a subscription or just do a one-time ad placement now.
Once a subscription is purchased, the payment steps are skipped and you go straight to entering your ad details, as long as the subscription is active AND the allowed ad count has not been exceeded by the user.