NATS4 Upsell Plus
Upsell Plus is a feature in NATS4 that allows you to offer your members incentives to sign up for other sites after they have joined one of your sites. In order to complete the Upsell Plus process, the member will have to click on a link that you provide for them.
Creating a Link
If you want to offer the Upsell Plus feature to your members, first create an upsell in the Upsells Admin, then provide your member with a link to your Upsell Plus option. This supports one of two links:
- http://<linkdomain>/signup/upsellplus.php?memberid=<memberid>&natsess=<nats_session>&site=<siteid>
- http://<linkdomain>/signup/upsellplus.php?site=<siteid>&username=<username>
Although both of the above link examples work with Upsell Plus, the first link is preferred. Replace <linkdomain>, <memberid>, <nats_session>, and <siteid> in the above examples with your linkdomain and the member's member id, session id, site id, and/or username, respectively.
Optional Variables
This feature also supports to use of additional variables to get certain effects from your Upsell Plus sale.
If you want members to be automatically submitted for upsells, add the variables &upsellid=<upsellid>&email=<email>&submit=1" to the end of your Upsell Plus URL. Replace <upsellid> with an Upsell ID found in the Upsells Admin, and <email> with the e-mail address for that member.
If you want any of the available upsell options on the join form to be pre-checked, add &upsellids=<upsellid_list> to the end of your Upsell Plus URL. Replace <upsellid_list> with a comma-separated list of ID numbers for the upsell options you want to be automatically checked.
Site Templates
Once you have set up your upsell options, your Upsell Plus URL, and any optional variables you wish to add to the process, you will need to setup new site templates for your Upsell Plus feature.
These templates are:
- gateway_upsell - Shown to the member when they click the link given to them.
- page_upsell_approval - Shown to the member when their upsell is approved.
- page_upsell_denial - Shown to the member when their upsell is denied.
Add the text that you want to display on those templates, make sure that your upsell join options are correct, and save any changes you have made.
Additional Security
As of NATS version 4.1, Upsell Plus offers additional security features that you can use to further secure your member upsells. The MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPSELLPLUS variable allows you to choose whether or not you wish to use the new member auth strings, which contain a variety of information and are designed to prevent unwanted upsell attempts by outside sources.
This feature will be set to off by default. If you want to enable this feature for your Upsell Plus transactions, you can add the following necessary code to the config.php script on your NATS server:
$config['MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPSELLPLUS'] = 1;
This will activate the MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPSELLPLUS setting to use additional security for your member authorization strings. Do not add the provided code if you want to leave this feature disabled.
Once you have activated this setting, use the get_member_upsell_string API call to get the correct auth string for the member you want to process an upsell for. Please see our API Get Member Upsell String wiki article for more information on this process.
This function will return the auth string necessary for members to get authenticated for the Upsell Plus process. Include the auth string in the link for your member, and they will be able to purchase memberships for other sites using Upsell Plus with the MEMBER_STRING_AUTH_UPSELLPLUS security setting.
Throttling
Throttling is a security setting available in NATS 4.1, which allows you to lock out surfers for a specified period of time if they make too many attempts on certain pages in NATS.
You can use the Throttling feature to help secure your upsellplus.php page, preventing surfers from forcing transactions without the correct auth string. Just go to the "Security" configuration page to do so, which can be found in the Configuration Admin.
For more information on this feature please see our Throttling wiki article.
