How To Force Buy-In Purchases

A common issue amongst bingo operators is the need to guarantee that players will buy at least one Buy In package while still allowing for further client return to acquire additional items, such as Flash or Pull-tabs.

BingoMeNow!!™ can achieve this, but it’s important to plan ahead of time and design your menu accordingly.

Consider the following image:

The image shows Your Menu (a family) and, underneath it, an Automatic Buy-in Item. This automatic item will be automatically on the user’s shopping cart, but will have a special configuration so as to be applied only once per session or only once per seat/session combination.

This means if the same user comes back later to purchase for same session or the same seat/session combination the automatic buy-in item will not be charged again.

This way, to enforce a minimum Buy-In purchase, you must setup your menu with an Automatic Buy-In Item that reflects the minimum basic buy-in package, and design additional items as upgrades to the basic package.

This alone will guarantee every single user has at least the minimum basic buy-in package paid for, but it’s not the best user experience. So we will have to add a few tweaks to make the purchasing process easier to the users.

1. Add a button for the users to click

Automatic Items are only added to the cart if at least one non-automatic item is added. That’s how the convenience fee works. You can’t have an order with only the convenience fee.

If a user only wants the buy-in package and nothing else, this restriction will prevent users from finishing their purchases. To fix that we will add one ‘virtual’ item to our menu and name it ‘Start Your Purchase’.

This item must be especially configured. Here’s a screenshot.

Menu Opener item configurations:
Max Qty/Order: 1
CSS Class: ClassMenuOpener
Confirmation: Avoid

It’s very important that this item is configured exactly like this. The ClassMenuOpener will make the necessary graphical changes and the other configurations will take care of functionality.

With this item in place the user will have to perform an action in order to place the automatic Buy-In item on the shopping cart.

2. Add a Family to hold the menu

Now we need to add a Family to hold all the visible items of our menu and make sure it’s only available to the user after he/she clicked on the ‘Start Your Purchase‘ item.

To accomplish this we will be using the ClassHideIfCartNotEmpty special class on the family / folder that holds our true menu.

To configure this Family, use the code ClassHideIfCartEmpty on the CSS Class option.

From now on all other items mus be placed under this family, and your users will only be able to see them once the started the purchasing process, because that’s the action adds the automatic minimum basic buy-in to the shopping carts.

It must be noted that automatic items cannot be removed from the shopping cart.

3. Add an Info item to communicate with the users

To avoid confusion and create a better user experience it’s recommended that you add an Info Item as the first item on your new menu, explaining that the minimum basic buy-in is mandatory and it’s already in their shopping cart.

Also, if this is not a user’s first purchase, the minimum basic buy-in will not be charged again.

It’s also a good practice to fully describe the buy-in package and add to the menu any upgrades the user might be able to make.

To accomplish this follow the instructions on the article on how to setup a section on the menu.