I will be building a website that will be a directory of professionals available for speaking engagements.
The professionals will pay for their listing and also we plan to up sell them to additional features such as graphical enhancements, top positioning, return in all searches, etc.
Event organizers will search this directory and hire the professionals by initiating communication with them.
In order to be part of this directory, these professionals will pay an annual or monthly fee. That will give them a basic listing.
I think RS Directory should be a good tool for this. I have Experience with SobiPro, but I don't like the way SobiPro payments work and they only support Paypal.
I need RSdirectory to be able to do a certain number of things and I would like confirmation that it can hendle it:
1) Sell yearly membership - is this built in or will I need RSmembership as well? Wil RSmembership give me additional features even if RSD was good enough to handle the basic membership?
2) I will need special offers to attract these professionals initially. I see these in the form of coupons, free membership for X months, or free premium fields for X period. How well RS directory handles these things? Could I send out a coupon? Or could I set up (even manually) a new client with free premikum fields that automatically start charging after 6 months? Will the system alert them giving them a chance to turn off the field?
3) This is more or less what we expect a client to be able to do:
- register fox X months and get discounts or free time
- Autorenewals on or off, with the record going off the air and a notice sent to the client
- create a new record
- enter their data
- insert a youtube video (premium)
- Insert image for their profile
- Insert additional images (premium)
- Upload resume or other PDF (maybe more than one)
- Get billed automatically
- receive reminders
4) One thing I am curious about is the level of interaction between the various pieces of the RS Joomla environment. For instance, I could see RSmembership used to bill the annual fee, while RS Directory bills for the premium fields. Then I'd see RS mail taking charge of notices, reminders, etc. RS Ticket can be used to keep track of requests and solve issues clients may have.
Given the premise, how well all these application work together? One concern would be the checkout integration. It would look bad if RSmembership checkout was radically different than RSdirectory or if each had separate profile pages. As a client of a professional website in 2014 I would expect all I use to be integrated and give me a cohesive feeling. How connected are these applications?
5) Does RSdirectory have a ZIP code search? I was unable to find it but I am doing a lot of research under very strict time constraints so I could have missed it.
Thank you very much for your help.
If, given the premise above, anyone has any suggestion of what applications would be useful to build a professional sourcing website like ours in the RS Joomla firmament, please let me know.
