Visitors can buy a gift membership for someone else

[janbaykara]

Stripe plan

• Gift view

  • /gift

• Pick plan

  • Reuse the product/plan picker templates and views as much as possible
  • Include a "you're buying this gift for an X month period, you can't cancel this"

• Pay (including country selector, ensure logged in)

  • No shipping details because the customer who's receiving the gift will put that in
  • How to exclude gift givers from shipping? We'll generate a special "membership shipping page" on Wagtail
  • Limit gift purchases to a 12 month window

• Post-pay: generate coupon

  • Coupon has to include the plan that it is approved for. Does stripe allow this? or will we do it in our database. Let's find out!
  • See if there's a way to exclude some plans from the customer billing portal
    • Option: disable cancelling / pausing, and do this custom behind some business logic which excludes gifts (Pause option on cancellation page #15)
  • Email this promo code to the person

• Gift recipients can set up shipping for their membership #11

  • /redeem page
  • Enter coupon (promo code)
  • If valid, register user
  • Use promotion_code in the Subscription create API call set them up
  • Shipping form — add to user
  • You're all set up!

Cancelled: Shopify plan

On the assumption we use Shopify / Recharge, we have a few options:

1. We can follow the current model, where someone subscribes, and then another user must register and ‘connect’ to this other user.
2. Alternatively, since Recharge can handle discount codes, a more simple option for gifting could be to sell a “gift” product, that generates a code, that can then be used by the recipient when they set up their own subscription. There is also a subscription service that does the code generation and sending of the gift cards called Rise.ai.

My sense is a gift card model is technically much easier to set up and manage than having multiple users associated to gift subscriptions. It will simplify analytics if we can track a member’s subscription across multiple payments (including discounted payments) rather than across multiple paying subscribers. This would be my preferred option.

[janbaykara]

From Melanie:

ANNUAL SUBS ARE VERY EXPENSIVE: PEOPLE WHO WANT A GIFT OFTEN WANT TO BUY SOMETHING AROUND THE £40-50 PRICE POINT. We could still auto-renew these options. A minority of gift subscriptions do continue over several years.
– we could present these as follow up options? So rather than ‘pay annually’ we could offer installments, one of which is an annual option?
Prepay and save:
3 books/months: £xxx 6 books/months: £xxx 12 books: £xxx
I’m not sure if this is a good idea, or if it just complicates things too much.

Potentially we can defer some of the more complex aspects of this to a future release.