The primary way to sell a membership through your Drupal site is to sell a Drupal role. Once the customer has purchased a role, all of the benefits of that role will become available. So, the first thing you should do is create a role that you can then sell, although you can leave access permissions until later. Please refer to the handbook for more information about managing users and setting up roles.

You will also need to enable a product module. Probably the best starting point is the generic product which is quite feature-less product on it's own.

Having enabled an appropriate product module, and configured your new role (or if you are happy selling the default "authenticated user"), follow these steps to set up a role product:

1. Navigate to the E-Commerce role settings via administer » store » setting » ec_roles
2. Check/select the role(s) that will not be sold, and click "Save Configuration"
3. Go to create content » non-shippable (or whatever) » and enter the standard information such as title, price and description.
4. Under "Recurring products" select a schedule which you have already defined
5. At this point, save your product and then edit it again so that some of the other checkboxes are active.
6. Under the "Role Assignments" section, check which roles will be come active or will be removed after purchase and expiry.

Note that if you only have ec_roles active, and not ec_recurring as well, you will only be able to select a role to assign on purchase.