One of the main components of MemberMouse is content protection and allowing for great flexibility in managing content protection. The membership level and the bundle are the two main pillars of protecting content. And there are three different ways that bundles and memberships can be associated. It's important to know the pathways to creating the association in order to understand the end result with regard to membership and bundle subscriber statistics and ability to adjust bundles on a member's account.


1. Assign a Bundle - When you Create a Membership Level, you can choose to assign a bundle(s) to be included with the free or paid membership level. If you do this, you are in essence making the bundle a component of the individual's membership, or nesting the bundle into the membership. There are a few things that happen because of this linking:

  • In the Product Settings menu, your membership level will gain one subscriber (Membership Levels tab), but the bundle (Bundles tab) will not gain any. 
  • In the Manage Members area, the bundle will not be present in the "Bundles" column next to the member's name.
  • In the individual member's Member Details interface (Access Rights tab), there is only the blue member icon below their name, not an additional bundle icon. You can know that their bundle has been applied to their account by looking at the Bundles area of the Member Details interface. You will see the assigned bundle there with a blue member icon next to it to let you know that it is associated with a membership. 




2. Purchase a Bundle, Non-Member - A person who is not a member can purchase a bundle. In this case, the Default Membership level (must be a free level) selected when the bundle was created will be applied to their account. To learn more about this setting, go to Create a Bundle. In this case: 


  • In the Product Settings menu, the membership level associated with the bundle gains a subscriber, as does the bundle. 
  • In the Manage Members area, the bundle name will appear in the Bundles column. 
  • In the Member Details interface (Access Rights tab), there will be both the blue member icon and a bundle icon below the member's name. Additionally, in the Bundles area of the Member Details, you will see a green 'active' icon next to the bundle name, as well as all the stats of creation date, etc and the ability to cancel and edit the bundle.




3. Purchase a Bundle, Existing Member - When an existing member purchases a bundle, the bundle is applied to their account and their membership level is not effected. Therefore, the membership level does not gain a subscriber, and the bundle does. The information in the Member Details area will be the same as the previous example.


NOTE: If you have assigned a bundle to a membership, you will be able to apply that same bundle again to the member's account or the member will be able to purchase it. Since this second bundle will be a 'purchased' bundle, not an 'assigned' bundle, it will have all the characteristics of a purchased bundle. See the below image for a comparison. Once the bundle has been purchased, it cannot be purchased or applied a second time.




The question may come up now: 

What if I have a free bundle? How can a member or non-member "purchase" this bundle? Does it have to be assigned to a membership? 


The answer to this is that you can assign it to a membership but you do not have to. If you would like members to be able to purchase or apply a free bundle to their account, you can use the following purchase link:


<a href="[MM_Member_Link type='freeBundle' value='10' redirectUrl='http://yourdomain.com/confirmation']">Accept this Free Gift</a>


NOTE: You will need to adjust the number in the value to be the correct bundleID associated with your free bundle. You can also adjust the messaging if you want it say something other than 'Accept this Free Gift'.


The result is that when a member clicks on this link, the free bundle with an ID of 10 will be automatically applied to their account and they'll be redirected to the Confirmation Core Page. The redirectUrl parameter is optional. If you don't provide this parameter the page will simply refresh following the bundle being applied to the member's account. Read this article to learn more about the MM_Member_Link SmartTag.