Memberships

I am a newbie to adding dynamic features to a website. I purchased Data Assist and eCart and am trying to add functionality to my client's static site to allow users to purchase one of two memberships and have access to certain pages of the website. I have followed all the steps (changing extensions on certain pages to php extensions, defining a dynamic site in DW, downloaded the free SQL database and created db connection, set up a testing server, and created a Paypal Sandbox testing account. I thought I was doing everything right, but when I went to create the ecart object then add the add to cart button my cart didn't hightlight and was not able to select the property to "Look up item ID from recordset". I'm assuming maybe I need to edit the table in my db or create a simple catalog for the two memberships? Or do I even need to make my add to cart buttons dynamic? I am kinda stuck, but I am thinking maybe I am over-complicating this for just offering two memberships on the website.

Has anyone here ever used eCart and Data Assist for a website that offers memberships, and if so is there a simple "recipe" to follow or do I need to learn more about databases and tables?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

***I was confused about when/where I would add the price for each button, but now as I read the note at the top of p.3 of Getting Started With Ecart, it appears I should have already created a Recordset or used DataAssist before Ecart to create a product details page???? I can tell this is going to be a lot of trial and error to get to my end result...sigh ***

before you begin with selling memberships, you should get familiar with security assist, especially user Level Authentication.

On the security assist support page, look in the archived documentation for a tutorial on user level authentication, it was written for Security Assist 1, but the concept is the same.

the different membership levels you sell will be essentially different user levels.

on the eCart support page, see the tutorials for adding registration to the eCart checkout pages.

the way this will work is:
The registers for basic access to the site. the userlevel should be set to only allow checkout.

Once the checkout process is complete, update the userlevel for the user to the membership level they have purchased. This can be done using the Data Assist update record behavior and the UserID session variable that is created.

Thank you Jason! I usually get stuck with the details without considering the "bigger picture". That makes so much sense to consider the basic access to the site first. Not sure why I didn't start there.

You're welcome.