Create your own VIP area to drive additional traffic and signups

Published on August 16, 2012 Create your own VIP area to drive additional traffic and signups

A VIP area can be used to drive your online sales even higher. For example, if you are a B2B wholesaler, you may wish to offer products that are exclusive to a group of your distributors. If you are a retail store owner, you may wish to start a VIP club to offer exclusive products. If you are a home business, you could also use this system to set up specials rules for “family and friends” as you might choose to offer them special discounted prices.

You might also want to sell memberships to your VIP club on a subscription basis as well. Ozcart gives you the tools to do all of this, “out-of-the-box”.

It’s straightforward to do in your store administration area. There are just three basic steps:

1. Create as many VIP user groups as you need. These might represent the levels of wholesale distributors that you offer, or might be a single VIP club group. The choice depends on how you do business.
2. Assign products in your store to those groups. There’s no special screen you need to go to in order to do this – Ozcart gives you a section in your product editing screen to let you do this.
   
3. Assign your customers to a wholesale group, as they sign up. You have flexibility in how you want to set this up. Your options include:

• You might want to create a special “request wholesale membership” form which you can create using Ozcart’s new Form Builder tool in the website content editor.
• You could add a “request wholesale” field to the built-in user registration field using the new Profile Fields editor in your store admin. When customers request wholesale access you can grant them membership to this group as required.
• You could sell a subscription product called Wholesale membership and active members of that subscription product are added to the wholesale group. You can keep track of active subscribers in Ozcart’s admin.

Once set up, only members of the relevant wholesale group will be able to see those products. Ozcart also gives you the flexibility to set different product prices, payment and shipping methods on a per VIP/wholesale group basis meaning you can have an unlimited number of wholesale pricing levels. You can also run promotions or send email marketing mailouts that only apply to particular groups in your store, giving you more flexibility in your ability to leverage the groups in your store.