Membership plans bought with store credit and automatic tier upgrades

The challenge

A Malaysian online printing store wanted to place customers in paid membership tiers, built on customer groups. Customers could either buy a plan or earn an upgrade automatically by spending more. The business model also relied on store credit, so plans had to be paid for with credit rather than a standard card payment.

The owner set out the rules in a detailed written specification: how plans are bought, which upgrades are allowed from which level, what happens when a plan expires, and how checkout should behave for members. The store also used a premium storefront theme and a separate admin theme, so any new screens had to fit both.

What we did

• Foundation. The client licensed our paid-membership extension, and we installed it on a staging copy of the store, adapting it to the storefront and admin themes.
• Plans bought with store credit. Customers add a membership plan to the cart and pay using store credit, with group-level rules controlling which upgrades are permitted.
• Automatic upgrades and downgrades. A scheduled cron task upgrades customers once their order total reaches a tier's threshold, and expired plans downgrade automatically to the default plan.
• Upgrade history and statements. An upgrade history records each plan change, and customers have a store-credit statement.
• Checkout rules. We added restrictions to the one-page checkout so membership purchases follow the specified rules.
• Fixes and hand-over. During testing we resolved issues with auto-upgrades, duplicate store-credit awards, gift-voucher entries and alignment, then delivered the full set of files and a vQmod package with installation steps for the live store.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart, vQmod, cron