It feels so incredible to finally launch a project that our team has been building for almost a year: WooCommerce Memberships is here!
First, a Brief History
We build a lot of plugins at SkyVerge, and we use even more. While we don’t have the capacity to do much client work now, we’ve had several long-standing relationships and retainers with clients, and we’ve done a lot of custom work over the past couple of years. This naturally led to using a lot of different plugins to ensure that you’re finding the best solution for the client before building any custom code.
Part of the reason we built WooCommerce Memberships was a frustration with a lot of the membership solutions available for WordPress. While there are some really great plugins out there, it’s always been difficult to fully integrate a membership solution with your store so that you can not only sell memberships, but sell products, too. Members should be tied to your customers rather than have separate accounts or “member areas” on the same site.
Memberships should be centralized in one account page, processed through one checkout system with products or other services, and integrated with your entire site, including your shop.
This led us to WooCommerce with Groups + Groups for WooCommerce and Subscriptions. We’d worked with a client on a very large membership site (about 15,000 members) that also sold products to make this setup work, but we envisioned it being better and easier to set up than it was at that time (about a year and a half ago).
Groups isn’t necessarily made for all memberships, as many sites need different capabilities, like the ability to drip content over time (which isn’t possible with WooCommerce and plugins or extensions – until now of course). WooCommerce was part of the solution, but a piece was missing, so we endeavored to build it.
WooCommerce Memberships is the result of that, and after 11 months of planning, research, active development, and testing, it’s now available on the WooCommerce.com marketplace.
Membership Sites Aren’t Just Digital
A lot of membership plugins are also focused on selling access to digital content — videos, courses, blog posts, forums, you name it. However, there are lots of other kinds of membership sites: purchasing clubs, discount memberships (or other memberships that offer “perks” instead of content), and memberships that tie into both your site and physical goods (like subscription boxes). WooCommerce can support all of these types of sites, and we wanted to make it great at supporting them.
While WooCommerce Memberships does put a heavy focus on restricting content, it also tightly integrates with your products and shop. This lets you create a purchasing club like an “online Costco”, a membership community that has access to posts or other content, or a site that sells physical goods and access to content, like tutorial cooking videos or complimentary recipes for subscription snack boxes.
WooCommerce Memberships brings your entire site together into a complete membership solution. You can:
- sell unlimited or set-length memberships via one or more products
- create membership plans that require manual membership creation for an invite-only system
- restrict content and drip access over time
- restrict product viewing or purchasing and drip access over time
- create member discounts on products or product categories
- allow customers to have multiple memberships
- easily view and edit members, including notes for a membership that can be shared with the member via email
It also integrates very closely with WooCommerce Subscriptions to add some additional firepower:
- sell memberships with recurring billing instead of set lengths
- allow members to pause, upgrade, or downgrade memberships via an associated subscription (and thus prorate the costs of the membership change)
- create membership free trial periods with a subscription
- determine what content should be available during a trial period
Learn more about WooCommerce Memberships
Memberships does a lot, but we’ve kept setup simple and straight-forward, and we’ve made it developer-friendly so you can extend and customize it. You can view all features and details on the WooCommerce Memberships sales page, which has screenshots as well. The full documentation is also extensive and still improving 🙂 .
Hi,
I have a quite a long and details question about this new plugin, since all the membership approach that available in other plugin still cannot fulfil my question and requirement so i guess maybe SkyVerge can help me. To whom should i email my question? There will be some attachments.
I can see you found this, but for others, we have a pre-sales form 🙂
This is simply brilliant. I have used several membership plugins and agree with the points that you have mentioned above. It’s been frustrating when client came up with some ideas and requirements that simply won’t work with the existing system.
Another major problem that will be solved is the ability to use almost any payment gateway.
I have been a fan of SkyVerge’s work.
Hey Puneet, thanks so much for your support! It means a lot 🙂 I hope this helps you & these clients in the future!
[…] was released this week, which makes it easy to create a memberships site with WooCommerce. Here’s an overview from SkyVerge, and a recap from Chris […]
Hi ya 🙂 Does this work for free membership sign ups too? Ie: They can just enter their name and email address and hit register and sign up? Just wanted to check. Cheers 🙂
Hey Alana, you can give out free memberships by tying the membership to a free, virtual WooCommerce product. This takes the customer through a simplified checkout that only asks for email, billing details, and password, and requires no payment.
How can I override the woocommerce-membership templates in my theme?
I copied it to \woocommerce-memberships\myaccount\my-memberships.php but it’s not working 🙁
got it–sorry 😉
What was the solution?
How far off is reporting features? Looks like a great product but reporting on membership is pretty essential. Or maybe the framework is there for creating custom reports without too much difficulty?
Hey Laurie, our next feature up will be a “My Membership” area of the account to show all accessible content, so we don’t have an ETA yet on reports. If you can list some of the stuff you’re trying to do, I can tell you if it would be straight forward or not to customize 🙂
Is there an option NOT to require new members for payment details if the offer is free – only name and email?
…if not, this is a very large barrier to entry. I really do need a solution around this and hoped you would have provided it. Please say you did?
James
Hey James, this isn’t currently available, though you can vote for it here. You could make a free product for the membership and greatly simplify the checkout, or programmatically create memberships at registration with a bit of custom code if you work with a developer.
By reading it, i love it! I am using WC membership from codecanyon. But this has a lot more features so far i can see. Just want to know one thing, if we restrict a page, can we have a customized text there? For example: Please buy this product (link of product) to unlock this content. Thank you.
Hey Jake, you can set global text for this (with a {products} tag to insert the products that grant access), or set a custom restriction message on a per-post / per-page level.
Sounds great! But is there a way to transfer user and membership info from our current membership plugin to WC memberships or is that strictly a manual process?
At present it’s manual. As membership plans and user memberships are custom post types, you could import them with any importer plugin that allows you to import CPTs (details on data structure here).
If your current set up has recurring billing and you import Subscriptions into your site, you can also use the “Grant Access” action to then create memberships once your subscriptions are imported (there’s a Subscription Importer in beta testing from Prospress).
Hi Beka,
How many languages is the WooCommerce Memberships translated in? Need translated from English to Dutch..
All of our plugins are translation ready and have a .pot file generated, but Memberships has not had any translations submitted yet.
A few pre-sales questions:
1. Does it auto send renewal reminders to both the member and copy a site admin?
2. Can you easily export the membership data into CSV to do simple reporting and filtering.
3. Are members able to update there details, like name, address, phone number, etc.?
4. Can additional data elements be captured as part of the member’s profile?
Hey Larry,
Hi,
Was wondering what will happen if you have buddypress installed on your website and you add woo membership. For instance if you signup with a woocommerce free membership product and you want to access the buddypress. Do you need to sign up again because it uses a different table or can tables be synced and signup for a membership means automatic access to buddypress?
Hey Dearing, BuddyPress requires pretty specific support since it has a unique data structure, which we’ve not tackled yet. You can do very limited things to limit access to BuddyPress content, as both BuddyPress and WooCommerce use the same user accounts, but you’d need full BuddyPress support to do more. Your comments and voting on the idea board would go a long way!
Hi,
Its a great plugin: well done!!!
i’d love to know if there is a way to show the membership plan for each email the user gets… is there a shortcode, an action or something? 🙂
Thanks,
Hmm are you looking to show all plans the person is a member of in any site email? Or just add the membership data to the emails only for the order in which it was purchased?
I operate a WordPress woocommerce website. I am the only one in charge of displaying products, prices and descriptions.
But is it possible for me to grant access so that customers can post their products online too but they can only access the product upload section?
Regards
You’d want Product Vendors for something like this instead 🙂
I am trying to understand the logic in WooCommerce Memberships.
If a membership is tied to a subscription product, am I to assume that the membership is never-ending? e.g. Membership Expiration Length be set to “never”?
Or does the Membership length automatically grab the Subscription length end date?
What happens if the membership date is set to say end of July, but the user goes in and renews their subscription in May for one year – does the membership get updated automatically to “never” or to end of June the following year, or is that something that needs to be done manually?
Thanks
David
Hey David, they become tied to one another — details on the relationship here.
Hi Beka
Thanks, yes I can see that info. Having used PMPro for a long time, I find that really easy and straight-forward to use because it clearly shows an expiration date.
With WCS and then the addition of WCM – it seems a bit confusing around which end date to look at / trust.
I guess the only way to find out is to invest! Would be nice if there was a demo side.
Hello, I can’t find the localization .POT file, aren´t all plugins sold at WooTheme supposed to have this file?
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/translations-with-wpml/
Every plugin we sell, including Memberships, is translation-ready 🙂 The POT file is in the /i18n/languages directory.
Thank you! I didn’t know it was under the i18n directory, it would be useful if you specify it in the documentation.
Can I place the translation in the languages/plugins folder to make it update proof? If so, what would be the name for it? woocommerce-memberships-xx_XX?
Not yet, if you want to put it there for now you’d just need some custom code to load that translation. We are working on supporting the languages/plugins folder across all of our plugins though! We’ll most likely add a blog post once we do, keep an eye out 🙂
Well I tested it by adding the localization file here “wp-content/languages/plugins” with the name “woocommerce-memberships-es_ES.mo” and it works! No code added. 🙂
Ah that is awesome, good to know 😀 I checked with a teammate, I didn’t realize WP core will load that if you’ve registered that text domain, so for any plugin you can use the
text-domain-es_ES.moin that folder and it should load ?Hi. How we can create membership plans and let users to select plan while registering?
Hi Karim, the member can choose the plan by choosing the product they purchase — I’d recommend checking out the documentation and quick start guide, which should get you up and running 🙂
Thought I’d weigh in on Laurie’s request for reports. We have two subscription sites, one w/ Groups, one w/ Membership. The latter site has three mbr levels w/ four pymt plans. We’ve already assembled a custom user dashboard to get to orders/subscriptions/acct & pymt info (which might be similar to your my ‘membership’ section being discussed. We’re passing detailed tags off to Infusionsoft for drip campaigns. The owners are looking for more sophisticated reporting than we seem to be able to get via Woo variation reporting, member exports, etc. That said, none of these allow for saving the settings so any reports/exports are one-offs that need to be recreated each week, each month, etc.
In short, there’s a need to be able to find/filter/extract details so the owners could manage things such as free trials, new members (in a date range), on-hold members, specific levels, upcoming expirations, such that they can either import same into mass email or marketing snail mail which means we need to merge w/ bill to/ship to info.
Right now everything is manual and quite labourious to on a repeatable and on-going manner. So to repeat laurie’s question, what’s the roadmap on reporting in order to change membership from a great product to a stellar one?
Hey Ted, it sounds like having a “saved” export setting would help out here, so you could get memberships (1) that have started recently, and (2) that expire recently. Am I following you?
Since you can filter members by when they’re expiring or their status, it’s definitely straight-forward to get this segment of members and do an export of them: http://cloud.skyver.ge/3R1X0b3c4012 — it just sounds like you want this process to be automated, so perhaps saving this export format / setting a schedule up for it?
Am I understanding you correctly here?
Sure, the filters are a start, but they don’t go far enough, don’t tie into bulk actions, which in itself, doesn’t do enough either.
By way of example, I can filter for expire, today, this week or this month – but not a date range or even NEXT week or NEXT month.
But then assuming one of these existing filters were adequate and I was able to filter down to a subset of members, the BULK ACTION>export to CSV doesn’t just export the found set, it exports ALL members.
AND the data it exports while it does incl fname/lname/email, it doesn’t incl addr, pymt cycle (M,Q,H,A – and yes I know that’s not mbr, thats subsc) or expiration (future) it only shows expired (past).
Granted the latter is due to that the subscriptions are set to be auto-renewing w/no annual expiration, but it just further points out that membership reporting, while informative isn’t terribly useful if not including user data and subscr data. And in that WP users, subsc and mbrship are discrete (and optionally semi-exclusive of each other) tables – the site owner is sorta left out in the cold of really being able to manage the members proactively.
Hi Ted, thanks for the additional info here! “the BULK ACTION>export to CSV doesn’t just export the found set, it exports ALL members” — that one doesn’t sound quite like what I’m seeing; if I have a filtered view and I do a bulk select / export, I only get my filtered view exported. If you want to open a thread with the help desk we can definitely look into it for you.
As for exports including payment information, indeed that’s one that’s related to the Subscription data, not really the membership data, so exports for payment information aren’t something we’d include on our side. Subscriptions 2.1 does add several pieces of reporting data for recurring payments, which sounds like it may cover some of what you’re looking for here, so I’d keep an eye on that. We’ll definitely look to see if we can pull or show this data for members more effectively once that’s released, so I’ve added this to our issue tracker 🙂 thanks again!
You guys make some of the best plugins, but this one is not quite there yet. It has great functionality and is super easy to use, but the display options in membership area needs serious improvement. I tried this plugin out but eventually here are the issues that can use improvements:
–Membership Area Display need shortcodes for various functionality – specifically to display members content (without having to click twice). Also for Member’s Plan, Discount Codes, Notes. It is far simpler to get viewer attention when all the notices and displays to appear on a single page…not spread out across multiple plans.
–Membership area does not work well with some themes that have additional content on the page. It replicates the page and breaks the layout
–Ability to turn of Membership table and place it anywhere you like.
–Assign CSS class names to almost everything you display so we can customize the layout. For example the title “My Membership” is has H1 tag, but no class assigned to it…and almost impossible to customize.
–Assign Custom Taxanomy, categories and/or post type to member plans. This would allow me to display plans any which way I want. This also allows me to use my theme’s display options to put the plans on any page in anyway I want.
–Ability to display Member Plan details in something other then a Woocommerce End point.
Heya Jay! Thanks for the kind words and feedback here. Happy to add some notes on where these items are going:
We plan to make some changes to this in the future, but because the “My content” and other areas are plan-specific, we don’t have a good generic way to make this a shortcode. Querying all content for a user across several plans at once can be resource-intensive and slow, so we don’t plan to do this in the core plugin. We’ve seen some sites where users have > 5 memberships, so this isn’t something we can realistically put within the core plugin at this time, as we’d need to first change how you can get restricted content for a user to make this feasible.
When we can require WC 2.6 (which changed the account page layout), we plan to make some nice improvements here to leverage the tabbed account better 🙂
We have a tutorial here you’d likely be interested in.
The entire section has a CSS class so you can target any other element in the template, but agreed we can add some classes to the headers to improve this.
The “Custom” part of this is the key here 🙂 you can do this with custom code already (except post types), as member plans and user memberships are already WordPress posts. Considering these would only be used in customizations, it’s reasonable to expect developers to add the taxonomies they need themselves.
The template functions that output plan details can be used in customizations like this for now. We’ve considered widgets for the account details, but want to to gather more feedback first. You might find this guide useful for outputting member area content elsewhere.
thanks again Jay!
“we’d need to first change how you can get restricted content for a user to make this feasible.” –
Yes…this to me was the key. When I went through your initial setup I found that your restricted content is tied to a product (or set of posts) which is tied to a membership plan. This implementation requires that every purchase in Woocommerce have its own plan. Perhaps future implementation would be to decouple this. So anyone purchasing restricted content would be grouped together…and can be assigned into one or more plans. And just because you are in a plan does not mean that you have access to all the products the restricted products.
This decoupling will make it ideal for categorizing restricted content (in particular product). For example all Lightroom Tutorials would be a plan, or all products from a single vendor will show up in under a plan and more.
If you want to see how we manage our multi vendor store…feel free to reach out to me via email.