I run a paid publication on Ghost. My company is incorporated in France, so I need a couple of mandatory information when someone buys a subscription, for me to send the invoice (is this subscriber buying as a business? As an individual? What’s their company name and billing address)?
The Ghost check-out form only captures email, and I’m told I can’t modify it. One option is to create a form that new paid subscribers are redirected to. Is there another way? If I get custom development on this, how much (should) it cost?
Install n8n on a VPS and get tokens from your admin panel in Ghost. Make sure you enable a webhook for a new user, take that webhook and make it a trigger in n8n. From there, you can set up a SMTP Node to send an email to that user. Have them fill out that form or reply to that email with the information you request, or even make your own form in n8n and send that as a link.
I can dive into it further later if you’d like.
But this is essentially how I manage forum registrations with Flarum on my site.
You can also set up with n8n with the Stripe API and do it this way as well. So you only send this out to members that are paying. I think there is a way to send an email via Stripe as well when a you get a new invoice.
I like custom check-outs a lot, but it’s hard to 100% get all traffic to them. Even after you replace all the links in the cta cards (shown on paywalled content), the comments app still steers users into Portal, and unless you’re also replacing the account page, someone who upgrades may miss your custom flow. (I’d really like an easier way to hijack ALL plan selection.)
The problem with emailing for data is that not all email gets inboxed, and not all users run inbox zero, especially if it looks like a “welcome to the site” email, which lots of sites send but I’m not convinced lots of users read.
Another approach (or a compliment to either approach above) is to track in Ghost whether you have all the data you need. They get a label when they complete the form (automation or the end of your custom sign-up flow). No label means your theme shows a banner that they need to do it, or even locks them out of a bunch of the site until they do it, or pops up the needed form on every page. Theme edits and a little bit of cloud function/automation/etc needed, but that’s another way to bump your form completion rate.
Cost/time: A couple hours of dev time to build a custom form, assuming you’ve already got a destination for the form data. If you want the theme to nag them, add a couple more hours.
Thanks a ton - sticking with the “paid member welcome page is a form they need to fill out with invoice info” for now, since they will generally click on the email confirming their email + the form is then directly on site
