Hi - It seems like I can use the vendor tools for my forum. Could the sponsor registration be paid and linked to payment gateway (paypal preferred). and is it possible once the transaction approved the member group change to vendor. I'm sure it can be done manually but just curious.. because actually that's what I'm looking for.
Thanks

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www.YamahaForum.com

This would depend on your payment gateway. It would have to allow for the usergroup assignment.

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Nathan Freedenberg
Director - Product Support
Drive Thru Online

Currently the self-registration of a company is not tied to any type of paid subscription in vBulletin so there really isn't an automated workflow. That said something approximately this could be done as follows:

- put together a page describing the different advertising options
- set up a set of paid subscription options that use Paypal as the gateway
- promote the advertising page somewhere on your site so that vendors will find it easily
- from the advertising page provide
- instructions on how to register a company using the self-registration feature of Vendor Tools
- a link to the paid subscription page
- when someone pays for a subscription move them into the vendor group
- with the Paypal notification that is sent, have an admin go into Vendor Tools, approve the self-registration entry, and configure a vendor rep for that vendor.
- send a follow up email with instructions on how to access the vendor control panel so he can fully configure his vendor directory entry, set up keywords, etc.

This is a brief overview of how it could be done. I've been doing some work in this area for a consulting project so I know that it can be done. At some point I expect we'll include this type of self-service registration functionality as an add-on to Vendor Tools.

Hope this helps!

Mark

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Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit