Member Renewal

For right now we have no on-line renewal. Please mail in check.

Are you set for on-line re renewals at this time?

A stamp doesn't cost much

L.

Ahh, it is that time of year.... Check's in the mail!

are you talking about my renewal? if so email me again and if I have to mail it or not. Bill

Paypal would be an easy set-up and encourage more web oriented folks to join. Just sayin'. 🙂

Yah how about PayPal. lets do that! Bill

Paypal costs money. Would you be willing to pay an additional fee to use it? Actually at $25.00 renewal a year our dues are pretty cheap. The easiest way would be to increase dues to $30.00 a year I suppose. What do you all think???

I could live with that. 🙂

Since it was my suggestion, I did a little investigating. It is surprisingly cheap to use them on a limited basis. Based on a $25 USCA membership fee, the current Paypal fee for that transaction would run just over $1.00 (at the highest fee) and there would be no monthly fees.

While I would personally pay the extra, I really do think (based on experience with prior clients and knowing my own behavior) that making it easier to sign up and become a member will actually increase the membership and you may not feel the need to raise the fee. I know I would have joined sooner had there been an online payment method. Please don't take that as a complaint. It's not.

I see this like anything else - online or off. If it is easy to participate, including paying money for membership in this case, it helps the newest person take the plunge and helps repeat customers part with their money. (Or, that could just be my skewed version of the world.) Heck, I even pay my other bills online these days. Call it laziness or convenience, but I'm hooked on it and others seem to want it these days, too. I probably downloaded and printed the application 3 or 4 times before remembering to get around to filling it out by hand and sending it in with a check just recently. I'm guessing I'm just one example, but I could be the oddball.

Anyway, since there is not set up fee or monthly charge, we could also test the theory of easy, online payment getting more members and more renewals. If it was set up, you could send an email out to everyone who is registered on the forum letting them know that online membership and renewal payment is active and asking them to join/renew and see what happens.

I'm the new guy around here and these are just thoughts for your consideration. Two last thoughts.
- You could also use this for payments for the merchandise available through the site and I think it would be important to let people know about that if and when you do it or take it for a test run.
- Here is the current fee schedule that I found through Paypal which I believe is the same for their Express Checkout and the Website Payments Standard products. It's available at https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/wp_standard

YOUR MONTHLY SALES YOUR FEE PER TRANSACTION EXAMPLES

$0 to $3,000 2.9% + $0.30 $3.20 fee on a $100 sale
$3,000+ to $10,000 2.5% + $0.30* $2.80 fee on a $100 sale
$10,000+ 2.2% + $0.30* $2.50 fee on a $100 sale
The pricing table above applies to domestic payments in US dollars. There's an additional 2.5% charge for any currency conversion and a 1% charge to receive payments from another country.

I see the formatting on the pricing got kind of jumbled above, but you can see each line is the pricing at certain monthly volumes and an example is tagged on at the end.

Well you know our Web guy has gone AWOL. We would need forms- store and more set up. Work out details of how to get Al Roach the information he needs to process memberships and Richard the information to process orders. I know how to put the money in the bank but help is needed to actually make this happen. Any web volunteers out there??

I would be glad to help if I knew how. Wish I knew more on the how to there. Seems like on the simplest end, what would be needed would be to unlock the membership form itself so that it can be filled in online (or the order form in the case of merchandise) and add the paypal link with the amount. I think that is how a friend is doing it with her fledgling magazine to draw in more subscriptions.

Might post something to the general forum membership and ask who could and would help to set this up? If you can't find someone who knows how to do it already, I would probably be willing to help figure it out. If you get to that point of desparation, shoot me an email and let's talk.

Gary

Personally, I'll continue to use a stamp. My PayPal account got messed up and the only e-address they'd use to correspond with me is the one I had when I created the account. Now that's a Catch-22 because I no longer have that e-address nor do we have DSL here like we did when I did have that one.