Membership Architecture and Best Practices

Membership Tier Architecturing & Capabilities

One of the criteria for membership is the form of payment, validation, or review for the applicants. Having this information helps the marketplace / vendors set different levels of membership.

Typically, many marketplaces will have a free membership and then they'll have different tiers of membership that are available for folks to purchase or earn access to based on how they interact within the marketplace or possibly be approved as part of an organization, etc.

There are a lot of facets of the marketplace that can key off those memberships. For example, giving permission to do certain things or possibly scaling the amount of activity someone can engage in, such as the ability to only view so many pages or purchase so many items, etc. If they’re at a free membership versus a purchased membership, quite often some of the features like enabling advertising or the ability to obtain marketing analytics data may not be available to them.

These types of restrictions on a membership type can help monetize the marketplace itself and enable the marketplace to be very profitable at a relatively low cost to the members. Relative being that it might be somewhat expensive, but they have a lot of potential to make far more revenue and profit than what they would spend on the membership itself.

So, this is a really compelling way to monetize a marketplace without reducing the number of registrations and the signups, and in turn dampening some of the momentum within the marketplace. Needless to say, some of the bigger aspects of the membership component are how smoothly and easily the registration process goes, as well as how clearly the presentation is implemented around how the membership works and how the membership options compare to each other.

Engaging Users With Discounts & Rewards

In addition to the actual payment options, it’s also possible to offer folks discounts or benefits based on how they perform within the community. What I mean by that is when a member is setting up their store as a vendor member or if they’re a buyer and conducting a lot of helpful reviews. They're providing value to the marketplace as a whole.

You know if a vendor is providing a lot of products and they're giving a lot of information about those products, that's a vendor who we would want to encourage through governance or essentially rules on the marketplace that would gamify or give them access to benefits based on how much they contribute to the marketplace. Similarly, you would want to do the same with the buyer who is leaving a lot of helpful reviews or has provided answers to questions about something that they are familiar with.

What we want to do is drive engagement within the community of the marketplace, so that users can find what they need quickly and get help in as much as possible automated fashion. So ultimately, it's possible to incentivize members who would then gain benefits or get discounts by providing them with resources that would typically be part of a paid membership. You could possibly upgrade the tier of their membership based on certain activities or giving them a discount of a month if they do certain things. In addition, you can also setup referrals, so that if somebody refers someone else the referring member could get X days free of their membership or a month free of their membership, etc.

And finally, the membership itself fundamentally is used to incentivize users at different levels with the different permissions they are given access to. These different capabilities within the marketplace and application can be configured such that all of the permissions and roles are very configurable, then you can literally set up an unlimited number of different membership tiers based on type of member. All of these different types of members or users essentially can also have different rights within the tiers of membership access that they have. With this sort of granular control, you are able to reward community members with unique benefits outside their existing tier, without having to upgrade their tier as a whole.