You can extend the standard membership feature with the Paid memberships add-on. It enables you to sell paid memberships as regular products. If your customers may be willing to pay for member access to advanced buying options - like closed sales, VIP prices, and exclusive discounts - this add-on may be just the thing for you.

To enable paid memberships, make sure the Paid memberships add-on is installed and enabled. After installing the add-on, you can create memberships as products and sell them to your customers.

To create a paid membership:

Once created, the paid membership will become available for sale, and your customers will be able to purchase it.

Suppose you enabled anonymous checkout in the store, and a buyer of premium membership access chooses to check out without creating an account. The membership will not be automatically assigned to that buyer until an account is created for them. Instead, the store administrator will receive an email notification on such orders with an "action required" warning.

After the order gets the "Paid" status, the customer will automatically gain the membership they have purchased and can access all the membership-specific privileges right away.

When the membership expires, the customer will get an email notification.

A store admin can manage email notifications for the Paid Memberships add-on from Settings > Email notifications: Membership assigned notification (Paid memberships module) and Membership expiration notification (Paid memberships module).