Been thinking of a couple different membership sites I want to build.
Have any of you had any experience with them?
Did you custom write it or use an out of the box system?
Ever used ezmemberpro.com? membergate.com? Any other recommendations?
In a dream world what I am envisioning would most likely need to be written from scratch but maybe I will need to just fit what I want to do in an off the shelf solution.
I'd like to hear about this as well.
We have some experience running a simple membership site, using the Paypal subscriptions system
We create our own usernames and passwords but Paypal can do that as well.
They have a notification system for automated order and renewal processing.
The system works OK but credit card payment for an automatically renewing subscription without a Paypal account is not possible.
To get more options and move to a different payment gateway we're looking at Spreedly.com currently. It manages a subscriber base and recurring charging but you bring your own code for the site creation and management. It seems we can easily connect it to our existing code, you get data from the subscriber base through XML.
Here are some other sites offering similar services:
http://www.billingcircle.com/
http://www.ariasystems.com/
http://www.zuora.com/products/zcommercemedia/index.html
http://www.vindicia.com/products/subscription_billing/index.html
http://recurly.com/business/
https://cheddargetter.com/
Does anyone have experience with any of these or similar companies ?
We tried to set one up with the gf's baby site which is on Wordpress - we used http://member.wishlistproducts.com/ and it worked great with WP and Paypal.
Hasd options to hide content for non-users, integrate with excisting WP users etc etc.
Pretty cool and something I think we'll revisit if she ever gets around to creating the members area.
Have a look at Nanacast.com and Amember.com I've not used either (never set up a membership site....yet) but those two looked pretty useful and a lot of the information product gurus use Amember.com
QuoteThe system works OK but credit card payment for an automatically renewing subscription without a Paypal account is not possible.
Securetrading.net will let you do automatically renewing subscription with CC. Cheaper than paypal too.
Not sure if that helps you, being based in Bangor :-\
I can't really recommend anyone but this is kind of my bread and butter so I know a fair bit
right now we run massive homegrown sites with rebrandable software, controls accesses, cross sells, upsells, gets you when you back out, we get them with 1 clicks and resales, prolly other kinds I'm not thinking of, they're pretty big systems though because they have to manage every touch on everything
right now we're workin on allowing logins all the time and then reselling you when you try to access anything, always entertaining the number of ways to catch a click
I assume at some point they realized how much money they were wasting so they started their own processor, those guys sit not far from me so our ability to do interesting things is enhanced.
I guess i am crappy resource unless you want some pointers on rollin it yourself, that's the only way I've done it
good to have you back jatar, sounds very interesting, would love to hear more :)
well, the trick is to define your free/paid split, we relly like them to sign up, so we really want to tease them into doing that, needs to be fast and easy, if they try and back out of it, then hit em with guns blazing, cookies for the various steps of sign up or that represent specific actions you want to key on work. You can then read those cookies in other places to see if they have "gone backwards" or they didn't finish a signup. I'd rather get a 10$ first membership and recur at 20 than nothing and I can always recur at the normal price, t tht point I could make their first period 5$, who cares. I make the money on the recur.
everything they see and touch is controllable, the amount of free content, how many clicks, sections, thumbails or large pics, everything. We decide on a site by site or even page by page basis. At some point you need to group things or you can go insane with the granularity. We split the content too, makes for less accidents our free stuff is on the free side, the paid stuff is under lock and key. Doesn't mean people can't steal it but they pay to do so.
For the free side it all comes down to configuration of the site, settings for all sorts of thresholds and when they try to go farther, pay. Then you can offer varying levels, down to trial size, real cheap. From the members section we just check on every click what people have access too and of they don't we offer them various ways to get that instantly, no waiting. We also don't give everything away, we stage it, people like updates, daily/weekly something needs to be in their email. Bit by bit, dole it out and they're happy. We break down our content in different ways and feed out pieces here and there. We also log everything, and we do something with the data, push things people like and kill what they don't
obviously the type of content maters but voraciousness for the updates surprised me, which showed me how having useless updates could really hurt or an email that offers garbage info or is put together in a way that the user doesn't find valuable. Finding out how they want that email is important.
facebook proves one thing, people want tons of bullshit useless info, it makes them feel informed, they also want control of that bullshit because it makes them feel powerful
so herd em like sheep and let them feel like the shepherd and you're good
early morning 2 cents
I am recently but have done the same thing in many different areas
I haven't checked it out, but this guy is spamming some obscure target groups on linkedin
http://www.subhub.com/
what caught my eye initially is he's saying
Quoteand you can get a free website for life if you act now.
although I think that relates to http://www.subhublite.com/.