Use WooCommerce to allow gifting of MemberPress products

Introduction

Overview

One of MemberFix customers needed to implement gifting functionality on her membership WordPress website. This request proved to be quite a challenging one because the MemberPress WordPress plugin she uses on her website was actually not allowing that. So we had to come up with a solution for this.

She has two membership levels on her website: Monthly which is $16.50/month and Annual which is $99/year.

What she wanted was for someone to be able to buy a Gift certificate from her website (corresponding to one of the two MemberPress membership levels), send the gift to another person (the recipient), and for that person to be able to sign up on the website with his/her name and email address, thus redeeming the gift. As I said above, MemberPress does not have such gifting functionality out of the box, so we found a workaround solution using WooCommerce and another WordPress plugin.

Note that this solution requires using WooCommerce as the shopping cart for any products that you want to use this functionality with. MemberPress will then register the user after they buy via WooCommerce, but you won’t be able to use the default MemberPress checkout form for this. You can, of course, continue using the default MemberPress checkout for any products that do not need to be gifted.

The benefit of this approach is that you can make WooCommerce essentially hidden from sight, and only use it for situations where you need to employ the gifting functionality.

Installing and activating the plugins

Install WooCommerce

Go to Plugins > Add New > Search for “woocommerce” then install and activate the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress site. It’s free!

Install WooCommerce Gift Certificates Pro

We found a cool plugin called WooCommerce Gift Certificates Pro which will help us to achieve the final result. Unfortunately, this one isn’t free (it’s $99) and you’ll have to purchase a license to be able to use it.

Once you’ve purchased it and downloaded the .zip file, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin then find the .zip file on your hard drive, select it, and install & activate the plugin.

Activate the MemberPress WooCommerce add-on

We also need to install and activate the MemberPress WooCommerce add-on – which is only available on the Plus and Pro tiers of your MemberPress subscription (it’s not available on the lowest plan) – in order to integrate MemberPress with WooCommerce.

To do this go to WordPress > MemberPress > Activate > Add-Ons > WooCommerce > Click “Install”

Creating the Gift Certificate product

Let’s say, for example, that we want to create the possibility for people to buy gift certificates for the Annual membership. To start, we will create a WooCommerce product with a $99 price and with the following settings:

So the first setting above is to make the product a simple virtual one. And then the below settings are related to the Gift Certificates tab which is added by the WooCommerce Gift Certificates Pro plugin.

The first setting for the gift certificates is to enable them and check “Display in product page”.

Then choose “Gift Certificate/Store Credit” for Discount type, add the $99 value of the coupon (which corresponds to the price of Annual membership) and set “Usage limit” to 1 (which prevents the generated code from used more than once).

So when someone wants to offer a gift to someone else, they will just go and buy the gift certificate. During this process, on the checkout page, they can add the recipient’s name, email address and a personalized message.

Creating the page for the recipient to redeem the gift certificate code

Once the gift certificate is bought and the payment is completed, then the recipient will get an email with instructions on where to go in order to use the coupon code (which is generated and displayed in the email he will get). That message can be customized by going to WooCommerce > Settings > Gift Certs at the bottom:

So in the above email we can add a link to the product which he will be able to buy using the gift certificate code. We will create the virtual WooCommerce product for this and call it Annual Subscription, and use the same price of $99 (which is exactly the value of the gift certificate which the giftee has received).

Next, click on the MemberPress tab and choose the Annual Subscription membership:

This step is very important because when the recipient is “buying” this WooCommerce product he will also automatically become a member of the Annual Membership product inside of MemberPress. And that is because the Annual Subscription product is tied with the MemberPress Annual membership via the MemberPress WooCommerce add-on that we activated earlier.

Yea, it’s a bit confusing but just follow the steps and it’ll work fine. 🙂

Shortly, the recipient will go to the Annual Subscription page:

And then, before proceeding to checkout he will add the coupon code which he got via email which has a $99 value. This will make the final value of the product he will “buy” to be $0.

In this way, the recipient automatically becomes a MemberPress user with access to the respective MemberPress protected content as a result of using his gift certificate that somebody was kind enough to purchase for him. That’s it!

Just let me know any comments, questions and I’ll be happy to answer.