All-in-one business solution, payments, emails, CRM

Question

I'm creating a solution for a new business. Its a membership model where a new member can pay online or in person. Then they have a monthly membership fee. I'm looking to accomplish the following using the fewest separate applications/vendors:

• Account Management / CRM
• Email Marketing
• Payment Capture - in person
• Payment Capture - monthly recurring

I'm also happy to development my own components or integrations. There seem to be endless possibilities and I don't know where to start. Some combinations I've considered are a custom app tied to square and mailchimp, custom app tied to square using square's marketing tools, custom app tied to mailchimp with a shopify integration.

Any suggestions or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

What is the benefit to integrating a bunch of apps into one products (yours) vs companies that already provide this, like Regpack or Wild Apricot? With these companies, they integrate payments via their own relationship with a payment processor and have their own recurring billing functions, automated emails, etc.

I can see if you are wanting to just create a direct competitor to these services, but if not, the only downside I see of these other services is being locked in to their email mgt platform or their payment processors, but in your case this would also be the case.

What's the angle?

Also regarding in person payments, this is going to require a card reader or some other hardware device, unless in person payments would be checks or cash that are recorded manually into your system.