WooCommerce Memberships is not just another plugin for restricting your site’s content: it’s an easy-to-use, site-wide membership solution that brings your content, shop, and memberships together.

Memberships allows you to create an entire membership system that’s seamlessly tied to your store.

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 member perks within your store.

Sell or Assign Memberships

Memberships are not a specific type of WooCommerce 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.

Offer Better Shipping Options to Members

Members should be your most loyal customers, so giving them perks that encourage them to purchase repeatedly from you keeps them coming back for more. Memberships extends your free shipping settings so you can offer free shipping directly to your members, while requiring non-members to meet other criteria (like having a coupon or minimum order amount).

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 have a lot of tools to manage members within WooCommerce, but you may want to connect to other services too, such as importing a member list into an email tool. Memberships lets you export members to a CSV file so that you can get member data out of WooCommerce and into other tools.

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: WooCommerce Subscriptions.

When both plugins are active, Memberships can leverage some features of Subscriptions to give you more flexibility over membership billing (more details in our documentation):

• 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 to support installment payments
• 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.

Selling Memberships to Companies or Groups

Need to sell memberships to teams, companies, or groups instead? Check out the Teams for WooCommerce Memberships extension (purchased separately). This plugin adds on to WooCommerce Memberships, letting to sell access to a group of users instead of an individual.

How to Get Started

Ready to create memberships for your customers? You can get going with these steps:

1. Buy this extension 
2. Download and install Memberships in your WooCommerce store
3. Create your Membership Plans and Members
4. Check out our extensive documentation for any advanced setup help
5. That’s it! Sit back and enjoy your fully integrated membership site!

The post WooCommerce Memberships first appeared on CODIBU.

Have a question of your own that’s not answered here? We’d be happy to help out  You can submit a question to our pre-sales team.

Customer access

Can customers have more than one membership?

Yes! Memberships are not tied to a user role, so customers (or any user on your site) can have multiple memberships. They can manage them from the “My Account” section.

When is a membership created for a customer?

Membership access is granted for any paid order (status is ‘processing’ or ‘complete’). If you’d like to only allow completed orders, check out our snippet samples for help.

When is membership access granted?

If you’ve set content to be available immediately, members can access it as soon as their memberships are active. If you’ve dripped content, it’s available after the delay you’ve set. So for example, if I sign up on January 1, and content is dripped for one month, I can access it at midnight UTC on February 1 (you could adjust this to your server timezone with a snippet, though).

Can guests purchase memberships?

No – every member must have an account on your site, because membership access is tied to the account. This is how Memberships knows that a user belongs to a membership plan when they return to your site.

When a guest attempts to purchase a product tied a membership plan, Memberships will prompt them to either create a new account or login to an existing account before they can complete the purchase (as Subscriptions does). Typically, this only adds one or two fields to checkout (for the username and password), though depending on your WooCommerce settings, just an email address might be sufficient to create an account and send an auto-generated password to the user.

Please note that even if your WooCommerce settings permit guest checkout or prohibit account creation during checkout, Memberships will override these settings to force account creation when the user is purchasing a product tied to a membership plan.

Can customers upgrade or downgrade memberships?

Customers can upgrade or downgrade memberships if you’re using WooCommerce Subscriptions to sell recurring memberships. Set length memberships cannot be upgraded or downgraded, as Memberships isn’t involved with billing, proration, etc.

If Subscriptions is used, Memberships ties into all Subscriptions actions, so an upgrade or downgrade of a subscription will trigger a change in membership plan. If you don’t want customers to pay a recurring payment, you can configure Subscriptions to only process one charge for the membership, which will still allow you to take advantage of switching (upgrade / downgrade).

Our Subscriptions integration document has more details.

Does Memberships prevent members from sharing their login credentials?

No – however, there are a number of plugins available that prevent users from logging in on multiple devices or from different locations at the same time, such as:

• Loggedin – Limit Active Logins
• WP Bouncer

Customer experience

Can I give shipping perks to my members?

Yes! If you use WooCommerce 3.2 or newer, and Memberships 1.10 or newer, you can offer free shipping to some or all members on your site.

Can I redirect members to their content after purchase?

As a customer can purchase more than one membership at a time, Memberships can’t reliably redirect a customer to members content — a purchase note is a much better solution for this. Ask customers to go to the “My Account” page and click “View” for the membership to see the membership content and perks.

Memberships will show a link to the account page or members area on the order confirmation and order emails for customers once the order has been paid for to do this as well:

Want to know more about the members area? See more in the membership plans document.

Can I send more emails to members?

You can email members directly with member notes, and around the time their membership expires with expiration emails. If you’d like to send additional emails, we recommend checking out the Jilt integration.

How do I disable discount notices?

Discount notices can be disabled by clearing the discount text. If you leave the discount notices blank under WooCommerce > Settings > Memberships > Products, they will not be shown to non-members.

Can the Memberships account area be removed?

I use subscriptions to manage memberships, so I don’t want to show the “Memberships” table or link in customer accounts. Can it be removed?

First, we don’t recommend this as the “Memberships” account tab is needed for members to access the members area. Second, Memberships will not show member actions (like “Cancel”) if the membership is tied to a subscription — instead, it will force any cancellation / pausing / etc actions to use the subscription instead in order to keep billing and access in sync.

If you don’t want to show this account section, you can remove the “My Memberships” endpoint.

Admin management

Can I apply memberships to existing customers?

Yes, Memberships has a couple of tools that will help you grant membership access to customers.

First, you can manually grant membership access to a user under the “Memberships > Members” screen to any membership plan. Second, you can retroactively apply memberships when editing a plan by clicking “Grant Access” for existing purchases – if customers have purchased a product that grants access to the membership in the past, a new membership will be added (more in the document on User Memberships).

Can I give away free memberships?

Absolutely. You can do so by tying the membership to a free WooCommerce product. We recommend marking this product as “virtual” as well since the Membership does not require shipping. This will let the customer add the free product to the cart and “purchase” it without payment.

If you want to simplify the process even further, you can also create a membership plan that grants access upon “user account registration”. This will create a membership for every registration on your site, such as via the account page, checkout, WP registration, or other processes.

Can I test how members will see my content so I know what it looks like?

For sure! As an administrator (or shop manager) user on your site, no content will be restricted to you so that you can easily manage your site. If you want to see what your shop looks like as a non-member, you can log out, use an incognito window, or a different browser to view your site.

To view your site as a member, you can use our User Switching integration to easily impersonate a member. For example, this can let you view your site as a temporary gold member so you can ensure your restriction rules are set up correctly.

Does using Memberships comply with privacy regulations like the GDPR & PECR?

Yes, purchasing user memberships and storing information associated with them is no different than processing an order and storing its related information. This would fall under processing data to fulfill a contract, so no consent or notice is needed for storing membership data. You can see more about how Memberships works with core WordPress and WooCommerce privacy tools here.

Content protection

Does Memberships protect direct download links?

Memberships does not restrict downloadable file URLs specifically, as (1) it assumes that an URL for a download you’ll share is one that should be “share-able” and not restricted, and (2) directly restricted downloads happens at the server level (outside of PHP, which is the language WordPress / plugins use), so trying to restrict this purely via PHP code isn’t truly possible and would depend on your server configuration.

To protect downloadable files, we typically recommend taking one of these strategies:

1. Add the file to a free WooCommerce downloadable product, then restrict this product to your membership. This lets members “purchase” the free product to get access to the downloadable files, and they’re protected by WooCommerce’s user authentication for members only.
2. Use something like the Subscription Downloads plugin to achieve this instead (if your membership will be using Subscriptions). This plugin lets you “assign” downloadable products to a subscription (these products don’t even have to be purchasable). When a user purchases the subscription for your membership, they’ll have a list of the associated downloads available in the account page.

Are comments or RSS feeds restricted?

Any content that is restricted will be removed from your site’s RSS feeds so that it’s protected from non-members. So, if your site uses “Hide complete” or “Redirect to page” as the restriction modes, this content is completely removed from RSS feeds.

If the content is restricted, comments on that content will not be shown. If the restriction mode is “Hide content only”, the comments section will be protected with a “comments closed” message until a membership is purchased.

If I restrict a page / post / etc, will the entire page be restricted?

In short, yes. Adding content to restriction rules will hide the entire content, unless your settings show excerpts, in which case the excerpt will be shown.

If you only want to restrict a portion of the content, you can use the plugin’s shortcodes to restrict content sections, or show content sections only to non-members (i.e., log in, content restricted, or upgrade notices).

How does restricting content with Memberships impact my site’s SEO?

Search engines can’t index content restricted by Memberships. If you’d like to index some of your protected content for SEO purposes, you can enable excerpts and use the “Hide content only” (recommended) or “Redirect to page” restriction modes.

By default, excerpts display the first 50 words of your page or post. To make the most of your excerpts, you can instead write them yourself from the page/post editor. While more labor-intensive, this lets you strategically craft custom excerpts to include your targeted keywords and ensure they’re indexed by search engines.

Can I restrict custom fields created with Advanced Custom Fields?

If you’ve created custom fields with Advanced Custom Fields, you can use this snippet to hide those fields when they are used on a page restricted by Memberships. Please be sure you know how to safely add custom code to your site before implementing this snippet.

Integrations

Does Memberships integrate with BuddyPress?

At present, the only thing Memberships can do is restrict your BuddyPress pages (such as the registration page, your Groups index, or your members list) when the restriction mode is “Redirect to page”. However, the content is still directly accessible, such as using the direct link for a member profile or for a group’s page, so this isn’t truly a solution for using Memberships with BuddyPress.

BuddyPress does not use WordPress custom post types (instead using several custom tables in your database) to store its information, so Memberships will not automatically detect its content for restriction. You can vote for improved BuddyPress integration here.

Can I translate Memberships into my language with WPML?

Sure thing! Memberships is translation-ready, and the text domain is: woocommerce-memberships Most plugin strings can be translated, though if you use anything other than the default “restriction messages”, you may not be able to translate these dynamically via WPML.

However, all strings included in the plugin are always translatable by any translation plugin (PoEdit, LocoTranslate, etc). Please see some tips on translating extensions here, specifically the notes about SkyVerge plugins, as these use a common framework.

Please note that the plugin may not be 100% WPML compatible. We have worked on compatibility with a lot of areas, such as using the Members Area with WPML, but not everything (such as duplicated registration-based user memberships with WPML) can be solved on the Memberships side.

Does this integrate with WooCommerce Bookings?

Yes, a booking type product can be restricted or discounted based on membership plan rules. If a booking type product is restricted for purchase by members, non-members won’t be able to see the booking calendar or cost estimate. Other product details, however, such as the short description and product tabs, will be visible to non-members.

Does Memberships integrate with LearnDash?

We don’t currently have a dedicated integration with LearnDash, however, you can use Memberships to restrict LearnDash content like courses and lessons. When LearnDash courses are restricted, the course overview and status are also hidden from view. However, members who gain access to course content restricted through WooCommerce Memberships will not be automatically enrolled in the course – this will need to be done manually.

Does Memberships integrate with Name Your Price?

Using the Name Your Price plugin, you can allow customers to purchase a membership at the price of their choosing. Like any other product that grants membership access, the membership will be applied once the product has been paid for.

Discounts on Name Your Price products: while membership discounts will be properly applied to Name Your Price products in the cart and at checkout, it is not possible to show the discounted price directly on the product page, as the price has not yet been determined. In addition, any minimum and maximum set values will not be subject to membership discounts.

Does Memberships integrate with my payment gateway (Authorize.Net, Stripe, PayPal, etc)?

Memberships uses WooCommerce’s payment and order management features when charging for membership access, since this is done with the purchase of a WooCommerce product. As long as the payment gateway plugin is built with WooCommerce’s best practices for accepting payments, it will work for creating memberships.

All of our SkyVerge gateways are built to support Memberships. If you’re not sure about your current gateway plugin, we recommend reaching out to the developers of the plugin for more details.

The post WooCommerce Memberships FAQ first appeared on CODIBU.

We’d love for your help in determining what’s most important to build. This works best if you only vote for the features you need most, then come back and vote for others as they’re built. This ensures that we prioritize the features with the highest demand.

Don’t see an addition to Memberships listed that you think would be helpful? We’d love to hear it! You can suggest it to our support team and we’ll review it to add to this document. We may not add all suggestions as they may be too niche to help most sites, but we’d love to hear your thoughts. 

In Development

We’ll add details on what’s been added and what’s coming here. Version 1.12 is currently in development.

Version 1.13 (in progress)

• Expand user membership API: Create / update / delete API endpoints for user memberships
• Update CLI integration: migrate to being powered by Memberships REST API
• Early renewals for subscription memberships: allow pre-expiration emails for subscription-tied memberships when using Subscriptions v2.3+

Features available in add-ons

• Group or company membership access: Teams for Memberships adds the ability to sell group, team, company, or family memberships. (completed idea 1, completed idea 2)
• MailChimp sync for members: MailChimp for Memberships automatically synchronizes membership lists and status with MailChimp for improved member communication. (completed idea 1, completed idea 2)
• Member roster: Member directory shortcode is a free plugin that lets you output lists of members or members by plan type (completed idea)

Features in Previous Versions

• Delayed membership start – Notify members when delayed memberships become active
• Inherit restrictions for child posts – Let child pages inherit restrictions (completed idea)
• REST API – Add API endpoints for developers so member data can be read or updated by external systems (completed idea)
• Free Shipping: Add the ability to restrict free shipping to members, or exclude members from certain free shipping methods (related idea).
• Batch processing: Improve some plugin processes for better support at scale (import, export, granting access to previous purchasers, updating email settings, etc).
• Expiration Emails: Send an email before and after the membership expires (completed idea). More advanced email integration is available in Follow Ups.
• Installment Plan support: ability to set membership length independent of the subscription so that a subscription can be used as a payment plan. (completed idea)
• Membership at Registration: add option to grant membership access to users at registration (eliminates need for free purchase). (completed idea)
• Membership set dates: Set start / end dates for memberships as an alternative to access length. (completed idea)
• CLI support: add WP CLI support for developers.
• Member CSV Import / Export: Adds support for exporting and importing membership lists via CSV (completed idea).
• My Membership Area: Adds a dedicated area to the “My Account” section to show the member all accessible content and benefits from the membership (completed idea)
• Admin transfers: Allow admins to transfer memberships from one user to another.
• Sign up fee discounts: option to apply member discounts to subscription signup fees.
• Improved wcm_restrict shortcode: improved shortcode to accept delay and start_after_trial attributes (completed idea)
• Member discounts: Member discounted prices are now displayed like sale prices to illustrate discount amount
• Member actions: My Membership actions removed for memberships tied to a subscription to force use of subscription actions
• “Make Public” action: Lets you exclude individual posts / content from restriction rules.
• Non-member shortcode: Adds a [wcm_nonmember] shortcode that will display content only to non-members.

Gaining member access

Access from start date

When a customer purchases a membership the member gets access to any content that you’ve restricted, unless that access is delayed via content dripping. However, some sites want to grant access only to future content, such as news sites that only want to give members access to content that is published during the active period.

This would allow site owners to set membership access only for content published after the membership has been started.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Automated member assignment

This feature would add the ability to set conditions that will automatically assign a membership rather than grant access via purchase. This would make it easier for stores to create “VIP” memberships.

Membership access could be granted via lifetime events, such as when the customer reaches $1000 spent in the store, 10 purchases in a year, 25 lifetime purchases, etc.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Grant access via taxonomy

This feature would add the ability to select a product category to grant access to the membership rather than a specific product. If any product in the category is purchased, access to the membership would be granted.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Administration improvements

Member reporting

This feature would add reports on memberships under WooCommerce > Reports in a new tab. Some reports would include:

• Number / percent of members by plan (pie chart)
• Number / percent of members by status (pie chart)
• Length of membership / percentage (bar graph)
• Average membership length per plan
• and others

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Improved view / edit member

This feature would show additional member information on the “View” / “Edit” member screen. This could show details such as:

• Member activity: show last log in, login frequency this month
• member LTV (as customer or only as a member?)
• link to all orders for a member
• purchase activity: show if the member discount used for a purchase
• a better Member Notes UI to let rich editing

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Member experience

Member navigation menus

If you’d like to show or hide certain menu items based on the user’s membership, you can do so with the free Nav Menu Roles plugin + a free Nav Menu Roles – Memberships Bridge. We have a tutorial post here outlining how to use these.

This feature would be a vote for member menus that would entirely replace the navigation. For example, you could create a “Silver member menu” that would replace your primary navigation for silver members. This would require the creation of a unique menu for membership plans, with the ability to add different menus for each plan if desired.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Add member perks like coupon restrictions

This feature would grant the ability to create membership perks aside from product discounts. Perks could allow the shop admin to give members discounts on certain shipping methods, i.e., expedited shipping at a discount or free shipping on all orders while an active member.

This feature could also add the ability to restrict usage for a specific coupon to members only, which would let you give members a free item, free shipping, one time discount, etc.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Integrations

Dynamic Pricing

This feature would allow you to set up dynamic pricing rules based on the user membership as you currently can with user roles and groups.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Improve bbPress compatibility

Memberships currently has limited compatibility with bbPress, as outlined in our documentation.

This feature would add the ability to restrict categories and apply that restriction to child forums, apply forum restrictions to any child topics, and add compatibility for the “Hide content only” restriction mode. It would also create the ability to restrict user profiles to members only.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

BuddyPress

Memberships can only restrict BuddyPress pages (such as the registration page) or indices (such as the Groups index or Members list) when the “Redirect to page” mode is used. However, this won’t restrict “children” of these, such as a specific member profile. For example, you can restrict the “Groups” page, but a particular group can still be accessed directly by URL.

This is because BuddyPress uses a custom data structure outside of WordPress post types. This feature would allow Memberships to restrict BuddyPress content directly as it does other custom post type content.

View full details, make suggestions, or vote.

Other Minor Features

We haven’t added these items to our idea board yet, but if you’d like to see any of these features, please let our team know so that we can gauge interest and add them for voting.

• Add the “Memberships” meta box to the add / edit taxonomy screen so taxonomies can be restricted from here like posts
• Add a bulk action to change the membership plan for the selected members
• Option to select a page to redirect to for restricted content when “Hide completely” mode is used

The post WooCommerce Memberships Roadmap first appeared on CODIBU.

Memberships focuses on content restriction (what members will be able to access on your site), and when access is granted, while Groups focuses on user capabilities on your site. Both can restrict your content, but they’ll do it in different ways.

Comparison chart

Memberships vs Groups

ACCESS AND MEMBERSHIP LENGTH
FEATURE	MEMBERSHIPS	GROUPS
Sell membership access via your store
Give away / manually grant membership access
Grant access for previous purchases		–
Grant access at user registration		–
Customers can have multiple memberships
Create unlimited memberships (never expire)
Create set-length memberships (expires)
Create fixed-date memberships (expires)		–
SUBSCRIPTIONS AND RECURRING BILLING
FEATURE	MEMBERSHIPS	GROUPS
Sell recurring memberships alone	–	–
Sell recurring memberships when used with Subscriptions ($199)
Offer membership free trials	with Subscriptions	with Subscriptions
Can choose to exclude some content from Subscriptions free trial period		–
Supports subscription switching (upgrade / downgrade)
Decouple access from Subscription billing		–
CONTENT AND PRODUCT RESTRICTION
FEATURE	MEMBERSHIPS	GROUPS
Display & customize content restriction messages		–
Show how to gain access to restricted content		–
Restrict entire post / content types		–
Restrict post / content taxonomies (category / tag)		–
Restrict individual page, post, product viewing
Restrict product categories / taxonomies		–
Restrict product purchasing (allow public viewing)		–
Hide restricted content completely (404)
Hide restricted content only (no 404, still show title & featured image in archives)		–
Restrict content via shortcode	(details)	(details)
Can show excerpts of restricted content to users / search engines		–
CONTENT DRIPPING
FEATURE	MEMBERSHIPS	GROUPS
Can drip content access over time (don’t give all access immediately)		–
Can drip product viewing or purchasing access		–
Exclude trial periods from dripping		–
MEMBER MANAGEMENT
FEATURE	MEMBERSHIPS	GROUPS
Creates a member area to show members content / discounts they have access to		–
Ability to transfer memberships (from admin)		–
Import members via CSV (supports membership [and user] creation and transfers)		–
Export members to CSV		–
Customer membership management screens		–
Add private membership notes for record keeping		–
Can email membership notes to a member		–
Email expiration or renewal reminders to members		–
OTHER FEATURES OR INTEGRATIONS
FEATURE	MEMBERSHIPS	GROUPS
Setup complexity	low	high
Can provide free shipping to members		–
Can sell group or team access	requires Teams add-on	–
Works with Dynamic Pricing	requires Role Handler add-on
Works with User Switching		–
Works with Jilt for automated emails		–
Can create automatic member discounts		–
Remind members to log in for discounts		–
Can create member coupons	–	with Groups Coupons ($49)

The post WooCommerce Memberships vs Groups first appeared on CODIBU.