Magazine subscription sales through WP?

Question

I am looking for a way to sell magazine subscriptions for the company I currently work for. They publish magazines that are currently being sold through a regular shopping cart plugin for wordpress. This does not provide any reporting for us or automatic reminders for the subscribers. Is there such a thing that even Google has failed to inform me of? I would prefer a Wordpress Plugin as I am much more familiar with development with this CMS.

I am not looking for a membership plugin as these are a dime a dozen.

Answer 1

Don't know of a plugin that will do this specifically for a magazine, but it should be easy to implement in this way:

Once a sale is triggered through the shopping cart:

1. Have your shopping cart send an email to a autoresponder, such as aweber.com. Most WP shopping carts have functionality built in for a/r, usually including aweber.
2. Configure (if not already available) an email parser to add the email information to a list. Such as "subscriber_list" gets info from the email like name, address, sub start, etc. You can create a custom parser in aweber that pulls from the text of the email.
3. Program the a/r to broadcast subscription reminders at regular intervals, with a link to the renewal page. You can also insert other messages to broadcast. Segment the list carefully to separate out for targeted messaging. You can search from the records in the list and create a new segment, like subscribers expiring in two months, etc.
4. Other reports from the list can be generated. You can also set up a sales conversion tracking function in aweber that is useful. Hope this helps.