You know how hotel reservation websites offer AAA membership pricing and Veteran discount pricing and you have to put in your membership number? I want to have a similar function on my Webflow e-commerce site for members of another organization.
My initial thought is a custom input field during checkout that asks for membership ID and talks to Airtable to see if that number is found in any records. Is something like this possible? Is there another way to accomplish this?
Additional context:
I work for a building industry state association and we offer educational classes. We have member and non-member pricing options. Our current checkout process is an expensive disaster and I’d like to switch over to Webflow and Airtable to accomplish a smoother checkout process. However, we need some sort of functionality that can verify whether someone is a member of our association or not. Currently, users select pricing options on the honor system… not good. Everyone who IS a member of our state association does already have a unique ID number attached to them.
That’s a good approach. If you need real-time feedback based on the number they enter that’ll involve some custom Javascript. But it’s not too bad. Checkout this screencast, scroll down a bit and you’ll find the custom JS that used to do something similar. You could very easily repurpose that.
This aspect of it will be challenging. I’m not sure you can do that on a checkout page. You may wish to explore Webflow Memberships and it’s specific integration with ecommerce, too.
If you could ask for that membership ID before getting to the checkout page you may be able to direct them to a checkout page with the correct price. So you have multiple products with different prices, the membership ID sends them to the specific one.
If those solutions don’t help, you may want to consider looking into Memberstack. They area a layer sitting on top of Webflow that add a lot customization. Here are some examples:
Thanks for these ideas! I’m interested in exploring Memberstack, but I’m also wondering if Memberstack will be irrelevant when Webflow’s native membership platform is out of beta?
My issue seems complicated to me because users don’t become members through our website. They receive membership from an external place not related to our website, but we need some way to verify that they are in fact members of this external organization.
I’d probably be able to ask for membership ID before the checkout page, but we’d still need a way of verifying them as a member of this other entity.
In your case, having a membership system may only add complexity with little benefit. The reason is that Membership solutions built on top of Webflow are mostly designed to gate content- you can restrict who can access certain pages.
In your case, you’re wanting something a bit different, in two ways;
You want everyone to see all the pages, just to get different pricing
You don’t need a new username & password for them to remember, just enter a valid, current ID and they are in.
The lookup idea though is good, and Chris has good solutions for that. As far as delivering custom pricing goes, the simplest way is to display a discount code to them once they’ve verified.
You may even be able to auto-enter it using script during the checkout process for verified users.
It’s not about restricting access to pages, it’s about restricting access to content. Webflow Memberships does not do this, Memberstack does.
That’s a big gap being missed.
Like I mentioned, these two solutions serve different purposes.
Discount codes may be an option, but there is a lot of complexity in making sure that works as described and managing those codes (possibly their AAA membership IDs) in real-time within the Webflow ecommerce CMS based upon the changes in another system.
Far less straight forward (maybe not even possible) versus managing this in Airtable which has a lot of solutions out-of-the-box for folks.
That would require a user system (username & password) unless you left it open for anyone to bypass - which isn’t the worst thing in the world. But the OP mentioned how their similar solution today is not that desirable.
I still don’t see this fitting Lena’s requirement.
A membership system in general won’t help her determine whether the user is a member of “Org X.” SSO doesn’t equate to data-sharing, so it doesn’t matter if Bob the user logs into Org X and Lena’s website using the same SSO login. There’s still no way to tell on Lena’s site whether Bob is a member of Org X.
For the use case she’s described, I’d probably skip the extra monthly Memberstack fee, and just go with the ID validation part of the solution, probably Make against Airtable, or against an Org X API. That part of your solution should be enough.
The more important question is how does a positive verification translate into an automatic check-out discount. That would be pretty slick. I think it could probably be done with some custom script to trigger the ECommerce discount code feature, if the shopping cart isn’t locked down to prevent it.
Thanks for these ideas. I’m interested in exploring Memberstack, but I’m also wondering if Memberstack will be irrelevant when Webflow’s native membership platform is out of beta.
Nah… They serve different purposes. Depending upon your needs one is definitely going to work better than the other.
A great example is all of the ecommerce options. Webflow has a native option that is out of beta, but it serves a purpose that the other solutions do not (and vice-versa).
For all the ideas discussed above, Memberstack is the better choice. If you have different needs, Webflow’s native Memberships may be better (once it’s out of beta).
welcome to the forum.