Selling contact directory info

RE: We need to have a payment solution for a specific contact in the directory and upon payment, show all this contact information so the customer can call or email this teacher.

This is pretty specific and fairly niche. Honestly I can not think of a way this can be accomplished with Connections. Sorry!

In a more general context of monetizing the directory…

Connections does not accept payments for listings. I do not plan on adding such features. I recommend using a membership plugin like Restrict Content Pro to manage membership payments and renewals. This greatly increases your ability to monetize your site where a directory is just one benefit of the user’s membership.

There are other directory plugins which do integrate payments, but then you lock yourself into only being able to monetize your directory making it very difficult to expand member benefits and further increase your opportunity to monetize.

I hope I have thoroughly answered your question. Please let me know.

Hello and Thanks for your Reply.

A membership plugin doesn’t seem to be the answer for us since our model is a one shut purchase for one contact. In most cases, the customer will hire one teacher and could keep the same for many years. Once the customer has the phone/address of the contact, he doesn’t need us anymore. Also, we don’t want to offer access to the directory (the entire list) for a fee that couldn’t be high enough for all the info a customer would get.

Since your plugin doesn’t offer and won’t offer payments in the future, what other directory solution is the 2sd best plugin after Connections? Thanks for your time and help.

Sorry, but I do not really keep track of other directory solutions beyond a casual awareness of them so I can not offer any specific advice and from the little I do know, none offer such a solution that meets your requirements. Of course that simply could be due to the fact I do not keep a close eye on them to know precisely if they do or do not. Sorry, I know, not too helpful.

Thanks.
One last question since I have the feeling that your Connections plugin coupled with a plugin like WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart that allows to create payment buttons that can be inserted into any WP pages or post should also be possible to add in a contact of your directory as well? The short_code of this other plugin could be integrated in a custom field of yours perhaps?

If this PayPal plugin give me a short code that produces a Buy button with a specific price and id for each contact of my directory, would it be possible to integrate the detailed page where all the info of the contact is presented within the template like Circled (along with maps, address, bio, etc)?

Hope to find a way to use your application with a payment solution!
Regards

“out of the box”, I don’t think it’ll work… but, with some custom coding does sound like a viable solution.

WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart would have to record, as user meta the Connections Entry ID that have been “purchased” by the user. Depending on the hooks the dev has exposed will determine if that is possible of not.

Connections would have to check if the current user has purchased the entry being viewed and either show details or the purchase button. This would be done by checking the user meta I mentioned above.

Oh, good! I am making progress! ??

At first, I would be happy with a simple PayPal purchase button integration in the directory pages. Don’t need to control the fields being shown with & without payment. I only need to hide the email/phone/address + Last name of the contact at all time in the directory. We would manually send email to costumer or contact (not yet decided) so they can communicate freely after we receive payment.

So I understand that just inserting a short code to add a paypal button is possible out of the box? We would after a while need to find a way to automate sending or showing the complete information after receiving payment… once the business model is validated and volume kicks in!

You could enter the PayPal shortcode in the bio field in the Connections Entry. That should render the button just fine.

You would add the email/phone/address to the entry, setting them to either private or unlisted.

There is not a way to hide the last name though. Possible options would be to enter only the first letter of last name in the last name field OR add the individual as and Organization and only enter the first name as the Organization name.

So, that may meet your needs.

I hope this helps, please let me know.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Steven. Reason: fix typo, i'm sure there are plenty others I missed ;)

Yes, I will try this to see if this is the way to go for us.

I would prefer to leave the bio field intact with the button elsewhere.

Could we put this in a custom field with a “nice” layout (position) in the page?

Thanks again. Looking forward to use your plugin with surely few extras once we agree that this is viable.

Could we put this in a custom field with a “nice” layout (position) in the page?

Here, you are getting into a bit of custom coding.

Assuming you are just going to use the Default template… here’s a dev doc which steps thru making a custom template with it. In the template you can add the do_shortcode() function for the PayPal plugin shortcode.