You can restrict your content to members, but you can also “drip” that content over time to schedule when members have access. Sell access to memberships, include memberships with product purchases, manually assign memberships, and completely integrate restrictions with your store.

Sell or Assign Memberships

Memberships are not a specific type of product; instead, membership plans are created independently from products. This lets you determine how access is granted for maximum flexibility. You can assign 0 or more products (of almost any type) to a membership plan to support several types of memberships:

• sell a membership as stand-alone product — create a product for the membership, then tie the plan to that product to sell it
• grant access to a membership as part of a product purchase — i.e., buy a subscription for a meal box, get access to the recipes section for free
• grant access to the same membership from several products (i.e., a yearly purchase or a monthly subscription)
• assign memberships manually for an invite-only members area

Strategically Grant Content Access

You put a lot of work into your members-only content, so Memberships lets you schedule when your members should have access to it. You can drip content, which means that you can schedule when members should have access to your content. For example, you can require that customers be a member for a week before they can access certain posts or pages.

This gives you more control over how members begin using your site and lets you introduce members to your content at your pace.

When you use this with Subscriptions, you can even determine which content is included in a free trial period with content dripping rules.

Turn Your Store into a Purchasing Club

Memberships lets you create members-only products so that your site can become a purchasing club, or let you offer certain products exclusively to members.

You can restrict product viewing to members, which means these products will be hidden from non-members in your shop. You can also restrict purchasing, which means that products are public, but only members can buy them.

You can also drip product access so that members don’t get access to products immediately.

Reward Members with Special Discounts

Since you may want to give your members certain perks, you can provide member discounts for all products, some products, or certain product categories.

Automatically Show Members Their Perks

While membership management should be easy on you, it should be easy on your members, too. Members can find all of the information they need about their memberships in the Member Area. Members can access the area for any membership from the “My Account” page by clicking “View”.

You can enable any or all sections of the member area to show members a list of accessible content (post and pages), products, discounts, and / or public membership notes. If a member will have access to content in the future, the member can see the access date as well.

Import or Export Members

You can also import members via CSV to add new memberships, create new users, or bulk-update existing members by merging your file with existing data.

Simplify Communication with Members

When you run a membership site, you spend a lot of time on customer service and managing members. We’ve tried to make that as easy as possible with Memberships. We’ve added “Membership Notes” so that you can track information about memberships for a customer, add your own notes for your reference, and even easily communicate with a particular member by sharing a note with them via email.

You can also use expiration and renewal reminder emails to let members know of ending memberships and prompt them to renew or upgrade.

Memberships + Subscriptions

Memberships is fully functional as a stand-alone membership solution, but it works very well with the most advanced eCommerce recurring payments solution available: Subscriptions.

Memberships can leverage some features of Subscriptions to give you more flexibility over membership billing.

• Memberships can use recurring billing (i.e., monthly payments) for the membership rather than a set term (such as a year)
• Memberships can use Subscriptions as a payment plan, but control access length itself
• Free trials can be used for the membership via a subscription
• Content restriction and dripping can include or exclude free trial periods so you control what content is available in trials
• Members can pause their own memberships by suspending a subscription
• Members can upgrade or downgrade memberships by switching a subscription
• Upgrades and downgrades can leverage Subscription’s proration to ensure that membership costs are accurate

Even if you don’t want to use recurring billing, you can leverage the other features of Subscriptions by setting the subscription length to one billing cycle so you can take advantage of upgrades and downgrades or trial periods.

Create store credit style coupons in your store

Generate store credit coupons that enable customers to make multiple purchases until the total value specified is exhausted or the coupons life expires.

For example a RM50 store credit voucher used at checkout for a RM30 purchase will allow for a future purchase of RM20 or until the total value expires or is exhausted. Customers can also buy products worth more than the remaining store credit and pay the difference at checkout.

Store Credit includes a handy utility for generating and emailing a credit coupon to a customer by entering their email address and the amount.