Paid VIP membership with payment-gated access and membership coupons

The challenge

A US pet-products retailer, selling to both retail and wholesale customers, wanted a paid VIP tier: shoppers buy a membership and are then moved into a paid VIP customer group. The retailer bought our paid-membership extension to do this on its existing store, which used a third-party theme with its own quick-order tools.

Out of the box the membership flow did not quite match how the retailer wanted to sell. Customers could gain VIP status before their payment had gone through, there was no way to run a promotion on the membership itself, and orders placed by VIP members did not carry the product model numbers the retailer wanted to see.

What we did

• Post-install fix. Straight after purchase, an add-to-cart error appeared on the live store. We corrected the extension's modification file within days and asked the retailer to keep a backup of the updated version.
• Payment-gated activation. We changed the sign-up flow so VIP membership is activated only once payment has been completed, closing the gap where status could be gained without paying.
• Membership coupons. We made coupon codes work against the membership price and added a coupon scope setting, so each coupon can be set to apply either to products or to the membership.
• Checkout and cart fixes. We fixed a cart issue that stopped the VIP membership item from being removed and cleared undefined-index notices that appeared at checkout.
• Product codes on VIP orders. We first added a SKU field to the VIP membership group, then reworked it so orders placed by VIP members show the product model number.

All changes were made as vQmod modifications to the extension on the retailer's OpenCart store.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart, vQmod