How the Membership Model Enhances eCommerce

What a Membership Model Brings to Your eCommerce Store

Membership models are a great opportunity for an enterprise eCommerce platform. Adding a membership program to your eCommerce store provides customers with additional value so that you can:

• Create a loyal customer base.
• Establish your organization as a subject matter expert.
• Become a source of consistent revenue.
• Receive feedback from members to improve your services.
• Create communities for members to engage with one another.
• Gain insights into consumer trends.

What Do Membership Models Entail?

Membership Benefits

Membership programs usually include some benefit or incentive for becoming a member. This can be as simple as giving members faster shipping options like overnight shipping that aren’t available to non-members.

A membership model can also be more complex, such as having industry-specific or niche-specific training and information that your team has accumulated as a provider in the space.

You could then aggregate these resources (which are helpful to have anyway), and it will establish you as a subject matter expert and be helpful to your customers.

With a membership, customers will have ongoing access to updated, relevant, and credible information. The information could be presented as videos and guides, checklists and best practices, reviews of products, and many other things.

Many types of membership programs will offer intangible services or benefits. Depending on your space, this could be a financial or insurance product that you can enable. And again, there’s digital knowledge transfer. You can also give members access to certain events.

Memberships can be many different things. Most of the time, there will be something unique that stands out within your space that you can leverage as a resource that you can bring the market as a membership benefit.

Recurring Revenue with Subscription Model

Many of our clients will do something simple like a subscription, but they can include a product purchasing group or discount group as well.

With a membership subscription model, your business will have a recurring revenue system. This fosters customer loyalty as they will want to utilize your marketplace more to get their money’s worth from their subscription fee.

Membership Community Engagement

You can benefit customers by creating this group of like-minded members. They can engage in conversation about specific topics to generate ideas, answer questions, and talk about related events, or whatever interaction you want to allow on your platform.

Members will also be able to interact with your team, who know the customers’ niche and so can interact with them at a different level.

Setting up a membership model as an enterprise eCommerce company is a way to open the door to a rich set of customers who are inclined to reinforce and improve the eCommerce experience that they get from working with your team.

This provides you with the opportunity to conduct interviews and surveys to get feedback so you can improve your offering and optimize membership benefits.

Valuable Insights About Industry Trends

It usually works well to focus on a particular niche or space within the industry. For example, one of our clients works a lot with optometrists. They focus on this space and analyze anonymized data from their purchasers.

From this, they can see that several optometrists are ordering a large volume of certain lenses and frames, for example—they can understand trends within the industry.

They can then present this anonymized data to their customers, the optometrists, so they know where they stand in these trends. Are they selling a lot less of a certain frame that seemed to be profitable before? Are they leading the pack? Or are they missing out on opportunities to upsell?

By answering these questions, the eCommerce company can provide more value to their customers. Maybe there are accessory items that need to be presented in a certain way, and the data can show what purchasers tend to buy more.

Many of our clients who have memberships enable forums, webinars, and trainings to help the members benefit from each other.

They end up being in a particular group, and there are some guidelines and rules about how members should interact. This helps each member get the most out of the interaction. It also helps the community continue to improve and gain new members.

Options & Purposes for eCommerce Membership Model

There are many different options and varying levels of depth when it comes to building an eCommerce membership model.

Some examples of what eCommerce businesses may implement a membership model include:

• Buying groups
• Marketplace eCommerce platforms
• Auction eCommerce platforms
• Group buying platforms
• eCommerce stores or websites

The purpose of the membership can be for:

• Loyalty or support for the organization’s cause
• Discounts, including bulk purchasing discounts
• Shipping perks, such as faster delivery times or free shipping
• Access to exclusive resources or content

When it comes to the “why” of adding a membership model to your eCommerce store, it makes sense for recurring revenue and establishing more value within the market.

How to Add a Membership Model to Your eCommerce Platform

1. Decide Your Focus

First, you need to establish what you’d like focus on for your membership model. What features and capabilities would you like to have? What would be most important to your customers? If you need help figuring this part out, no worries—we offer a free discovery session to help you evaluate your needs and then what features would be the best solution.

2. Work with an Expert Team

Adding a membership model to your eCommerce platform will involve working with a team, be it internal or external, that can execute on your vision. An expert team who has experience doing this will be the best option for maximizing your gain.

3. Start Simple, then Optimize It

It’s usually best to get something simple in place first—just get something working; then, optimize that until it’s ready to have additional phases.

4. Continuously Develop Your Software Alongside Your Membership Program

As you continue to build what you want, the software and IT infrastructure needs to evolve with it. Oftentimes, companies come to us because they’re at the point where they know what they want but they’re being limited by their software.

That’s why we built our eCommerce platform to not have the limitations you’ll face with other software. It’s an entirely customizable and scalable platform that your team owns the source code to. We work closely with your team on your project to establish your vision and a plan for executing that, which we accomplish in milestone-based sprints.