Group Memberships And Sub-Accounts

So you want to use DAP to sell group memberships or sub-accounts.

Eg. 1) A group membership – or multi-user account – that a School/College/Teacher can buy on behalf of their students. It’s either a one-time product, or could be a subscription product. In that case, buyer keeps paying monthly, and when they stop paying, all sub-users (child accounts) get disabled.

Eg. 2) Company A pays $X for up to 20 of its employees to have individual memberships. To begin with, the money is collected in one lump sum and DAP grants 20 memberships. Then each month Company A pays the Corporate/Umbrella/Bulk Membership and DAP gives credit to the individual memberships. If Company A fails to pay, all the “sub” members underneath lose access.

How To Implement Group/Bulk Memberships

DAP doesn’t directly support sub-memberships or sub-accounts yet. We already have this on our humongous to-do list :-). And we definitely plan on implementing it soon. But for now, here’s a work-around for making this happen. It’s fairly simple, yet it is manual, and cannot be automated yet.

1. You would set up a One-Time product in DAP called, say, “20-Seat Membership“. If you wish to sell different quantities of “seats” or “licenses”, then you have to create as many products (like “5 Seats”, “10 seats”, “50 seats”, etc).
2. In the welcome email, you would instruct buyer to email you a CSV file with 20 (or as many as your product allows) names and email id’s, one per line, in this format (EMAIL,FIRST,LAST):student@gmail.com,John,Student
   another@yahoo,com,Jill,Freshman
   …
   …
   member20@yahoo,com,Joe,Senior
3. And then, using DAP’s bulk-import feature, in one fell-swoop, you can add all 20/50/100 to your membership site and give them all their own accounts, usernames and passwords, that they can all use to independently log in to your web site.
4. If you see Step 1 above, we advised to make this a One-Time product. The reason for that, is you give life-time access first, and if they stop paying, then you cancel manually. So if the main buyer stops paying the subscription, this is the only time you will have some manual work hunting searching for those 20/50/100 email id’s on the Users > Manage page, and then clicking on “Remove” on their user row, so that they completely lose access.

Until we include this feature in DAP and make it automated, there are two ways to look at this.

One: You could say, it’s too much work to remove 20/50 emails when the main buyer cancels. OR…

Two: Since this is a group membership, you are hopefully charging them a good fee for this (if not, then you certainly should!). So you can always hire someone for $5 or $10 per hour on Odesk and have them do the removal of those email id’s. Removing 50 email id’s would take about 20 minutes at most. And you would need to do this only when they cancel, which can happen only once per group membership.

So hope that helps give you some ideas.

Hope this makes sense.

Troubleshooting Bulk-Add & Bulk-Import Of Users

Issue: You tried to bulk-add users to DAP (i.e., a bulk-import), and it is not working. No users have been added to the system.

Possible Solutions & Troubleshooting Tips

1. CSV File created?

First check if there's a .csv file that has been created in the folder /dap/bulk/ on your server. If there's more than one .csv file in there (from a previous import/bulk-add), then see if there's a file whose timestamp is close to the time when you actually did the "Users > Add > Bulk-add Multiple Users To A Product" action.

If there's no .csv file, then it's possible that the folder doesn't have the right permissions for DAP to be able to create the file. So CHMOD the "bulk" folder (in /dap/ folder) to 755. Then re-try the bulk-add again.

2. Is Cron job running?

You see a .csv file in there sitting for a few hours, but none of the users inside the .csv file have been added to DAP.

It's possible that the hourly cron job has either not been set up at all, or may have been setup incorrectly. Make sure the cron is setup and running correctly.

See both these links:

i) Setting up Cron

ii) All about Cron

3. Error in CSV File

Sometimes, it is possible that the .csv file was actually created, but it was actually corrupt. And you won't know this until the cron runs and that specific bulk-add job shows an error.