Month: July 2019

A couple of new things happened on the site this week.

First, there’s now a new product alert system in place. Not to be confused with a new product alert system. Let me explain.

Now, you can sign up to receive an email so when a product comes back in stock, you’ll know. Just find the product you’re interested in and fill in the field. Once the site’s reloaded, you’ll get an email to alert you that they’re available again.

Next up, the top navigation menu.

The main nav menu has been tweaked a bit to include the new Memberships section. As a result, a couple headings had to be condensed to make room.

You may have noticed that there’s no longer a separate section for Tanks and Drippers. These have been condensed into the Atties section. There’s also a Mods section where the Tubes section has moved and where all mods will live.

And finally, FIREWORKS!!

Happy Independence Day everyone!!

So here’s how I think the migration from Patreon will work.

I’ll be setting up the specific tiers here. These will kinda mimic what’s already set up over on Patreon (sort of). Each tier will inherit the access of the tiers below it and the basic breakdown is:

• Tier 1 – 20% Discount on all orders and access to all content
• Tier 2 – 15% Discount on all orders and access to all weekly updates
• Tier 3 – 10% Discount on all orders and access to all monthly updates
• Tier 4 – 5% Discount on all orders
• Tier 5 – The kind heart tier. No discounts or special access but my undying gratitude.

Each tier will incur a monthly subscription fee (just like Patreon) and will be manageable from your user account page. Cancel anytime but in order to change tiers you’ll first have to cancel your current subscription and purchase a new one.

Other cool features of doing this via the site here include:

• Allowing access to specific products to specific tiers
• Early availability of upcoming products to specific tiers
• Directed content to specific tiers
• …..many more possibilities I’m sure I’ve yet to discover

Once all the tiers are set up I’ll be making a post both here and on Patreon itself to let everyone know that they can begin subscribing. I don’t think I can move existing Patreons myself to the new system over here so those of you that currently support via Patreon will have to cancel your subscription over there and purchase your desired tier here. Once done, you’ll see a monthly recurring charge on your prefered payment method that matches the chosen tier.

In order to become a member of the desired tier you’ll need to purchase a subscription to that tier via that tier’s specific subscription product (not a physical product). Once that’s done you’ll have access to all the benefits of the chosen tier. (NOTE: The cost of that “subscription product” is the recurring monthly membership fee.)

Thank you all for your gracious and continued support! Stay tuned as we get this ball rolling!

So, Patreon is great. It lets people donate to the creators they love most and really help those creators keep, well, creating. The downside though, is that it isn’t really all that user friendly for the way I want to use it.

See, I want to be able to offer the great people that support through patreon discounts on their orders. Currently, there’s no good way to link your patronage with your scottua.com account. Currently I have to do that manually. Now, it’s hard enough to keep track of what I already have to keep track of and things that aren’t easy to manage tend to get forgotten.

Enter WordPress.

Most of you probably don’t know, but, Scottua.com runs on top of WordPress using software called WooCommerce. These two together allow for basically a roll-your-own Patreon.

I’ve discovered recently exactly how to implement this capability and I’m here for feedback.

So how’s this help? Well, a few ways.

It will allow me to much more simply implement the discount per tier functionality that’s so difficult/time-consuming to do with the current Patreon system. (Many of you have already inquired about the “Membership” banner seen on product pages and that’s exactly what this is.) It’s also just as easy, if not more so, to share content in many of the same ways as Patreon. Plus, since there’s no Patreon middle-man, it means that more of your gracious donations go where you intend them to.

So what do you think? Make the switch, or stick with Patreon? I’d love to hear your thoughts!