Club Membership Quandary

Hi all,

I am posting to a number of forums, because my quandary doesn't fit
under any of the conventional headings...

We sell annual boating club memberships in Tessitura. For the last few
years, we've built them as a perf with different price types indicating
the various levels (family, early bird, spouse, regular, etc.). We use
the Membership module to track expiration and renewal information, so
when a membership is sold in Ticket Orders, we have to add a zero value
membership record in the constituent's History tab.

The manual nature of this process is causing problems. Inevitably,
someone forgets to add the membership and so all of the membership
reporting is suspect. Eventually, I'd like our developer to create a
service interceptor that adds the membership automatically, but another
idea I've been toying with is that we could sell memberships as a
contribution in an order. This would have the advantage of adding the
membership automatically, but I am not sure if there are inherent
problems with using Contributions to sell things that are not actually
contributions. Does anyone else do anything like this? Are there
technical, procedural, fiscal or legal things I should be aware of?

I have also thought of ditching the Membership module and just tracking
expiration and renewal info using order dates. Basically, I am weighing
the relative merits of the 3 options.

Thanks in advance for any input you may have! Catherine