Creating subscription-based access or membership access within our software is just a configuration you create within the software. We have created our software with flexibility in mind with respect to the needs our clients have for charging their customers. You can create this type of configuration using the subscription based price plans feature as well as a switch in the admin to not allow access to the listing details page without having a current subscription within the system. Subscription based price plans can be created within the price plans admin tool. The admin tool switch to turn off display of the listing details page without a subscription is here in the admin tool:

SITE SETUP > BROWSING SETTINGS > Require Subscription to View Listings

The "general public" that doesn't have a subscription will be able to browse the categories of the site but they will not be able to view the listing details page of any listing. We suggest that you do not display any "subscription specific" information within a column of the category browsing feature but display this information only within the listing details page.

Clients have asked what configurations are possible with respect to placement of listings and access to see them. Using different user groups and the price plans attached to them you can give different user groups different abilities within the system.

If this fits your business plan you will basically create two user groups within the system. One user group/price plan will have privileges to place listings into the system while the other user group/price plan combination will not have the ability to place listings within the system. There is no limit to amount of users attached to each price plan so there could be just one user, a few or many users in the "ability to place" listings user group.

You place all users that will be placing listings into one user group/price plan combination that allows listing placement. Within each price plan you can limit the number of listings a user in any of the user group/price plan combinations. So you can limit the number of max listings allowed to one or several depending on your business model.

The listings have their own expiration. The subscription-based price plan can be set to allow any number of listings live within the site for users within that price plan. One way to assure a subscription is kept live is to expire all listings when their subscription expires. You can adjust the durations for your listings to expire at about the same time that subscriptions expire.

The recurring billing feature will work with any payment gateway that currently supports such a feature. This way you or your clients do not need to manually renew their subscriptions to keep them live on your site.

All of the configurations are based on the subscription based price plan feature. You can find out plenty more about the subscritpion-based pricing feature here in the support wiki.