As a store owner, you might want to limit certain products, pages, or pieces of content to specific groups of visitors or customers. You might want to restrict certain physical or digital items to customers who sign up or subscribe, or only give rewards in the form of content or products to those who belong to a special group. Yes? Now you can with ease.
WooCommerce Memberships allows you to create and maintain multiple membership tiers on your WooCommerce site, and offer exclusive content or products to your members.
Intrigued? Let’s take a closer look at how WooCommerce Memberships works, and explore a few of the ways you can use it in your store.
What WooCommerce Memberships can do
↑ Back to topWooCommerce Memberships is a very powerful, multi-faceted extension indeed. Here’s a brief overview of what you can do once it’s been added to your WooCommerce site:
- Create and offer multiple tiers of paid or unpaid memberships to customers
- Allow customers to sign up, pay for, and extend their memberships — or choose to only allow access to tiers yourself
- Offer perks like trial periods, complimentary memberships, and members-only discounts
- Hide products, pages, or portions of content from non-members or specific membership tiers
- Fully integrate with WooCommerce Subscriptions to allow automatic membership payments and renewals
Let’s take a closer look at each of these features in turn, shall we?
Extend and manage multiple membership options
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After purchasing the extension, you can immediately create one or more membership levels in your WooCommerce store. You can name your memberships anything you like, and as you’ll see, each level of membership can have its own unique set of rules.
If you want to allow memberships to be purchased by any of your customers, you will need to create a product designated specifically for this purpose. You can then link the new product to the membership tier you have created. Alternately, if you already use WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can simply link an existing subscription to a membership tier instead. (We’ll circle back to this again shortly.)
As another option, you can automatically extend membership benefits to customers who purchase a specific product — for example, you can bundle membership with a specific product as a special bonus.
After a membership has been purchased, customers can fully manage their membership status much in the same way they would manage a subscription. From their Account page, members can view their status, review any changes that have been made to their tier, and see when they will next be billed (if applicable).
If you do not want to give your customers access to purchase their own memberships, would like to limit access to certain tiers, or just need to make a change for a customer, you can always view and edit your users’ membership details manually.
Offer perks like trial periods, complimentary memberships, and discounts
↑ Back to topIf you are also using WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can create memberships that do not bill until a trial period has ended. This allows customers to experience some or all of the benefits of memberships, but without immediately paying.
You can specify products or pages to remain unavailable for trial members if you prefer, but immediately available when the trial period has ended (and the membership has been extended):
Trial periods can be incorporated into any or all of your membership tiers, and can be made as long or as short as you desire.
Built into WooCommerce Memberships as a standalone option is the ability to extend complimentary (unpaid) memberships to as many users as you desire. You can create a complementary membership for any tier you prefer, and set an expiration date or allow it to run forever.
Along with these perks, you can also offer member-only discounts. Discounts can apply across your entire store, or you can extend them only to specific products or product categories.
If you choose, you can inform non-members that a discount is available for those who belong to a specific membership group. This message will be displayed on products that qualify for a member discount, and when you have made the option available, like so:
When qualifying members are logged in, they will be shown their discounted rate, and the new product amount will be offered to them at the time of purchase.
Limit products and content to members only
↑ Back to topWooCommerce Memberships allows you to restrict access to parts of your store in a wide variety of ways. You can limit access by product or by a broader product category, and you can block off pages or portions of published content as you see fit. Users can be prompted to log in or purchase a membership to receive access, or you can simply hide inaccessible content completely.
While editing a membership tier, you can define which products, pages, or categories are exclusive to members:
You can completely customize the messages — if any — that are displayed for non-members, or members of tiers that have limited access. For example, you can display portions of pages and indicate which memberships must be purchased to access the rest of the content:
… or only display a default message indicating that the content is inaccessible:
For products, you can display the item’s page as usual, but indicate that a specific membership tier must be activated to allow said item to be purchased.
Finally, if you are also using WooCommerce Subscriptions, access can be delayed at your behest. You can give members immediate access to restricted content, or you can force them to wait a set number of days or weeks before the content is made available to them.
What is displayed, how much is shown to non-members, and the messages used are all editable. Instructions are given in the event that you would like to utilize shortcodes — for example, which products (that is, the membership SKUs) must be purchased to allow access, or if you would like to provide a “log in” link for existing members to quickly gain access.
As a bonus, you can selectively limit the display of portions of pages to non-members. This is accomplished with the [wcm_restrict] shortcode. Any content wrapped with the shortcode and the name of your preferred tier(s) will display only to these members, while non-members will see the rest of the page as usual.
Integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions
↑ Back to topAs a final note, WooCommerce Memberships has been designed to fully integrate with WooCommerce Subscriptions. This means that you are able to create a paid subscription for any or all of your membership tiers, and automatically bill and collect membership fees on the schedule you define.
To integrate WooCommerce Memberships with WooCommerce Subscriptions, select the appropriate Subscriptions product in your store when creating a new membership plan instead of creating a new product. You will see the above note appear after this has been done, which states that the membership will remain active as long as the subscription is active.
As in the example above, each customer who purchases the “Monthly Membership” subscription will automatically receive the membership benefits offered in the “Silver” membership plan, and their membership will remain active as long as they pay their subscription through WooCommerce Subscriptions.
Completely automate syncing member lists with MailChimp
↑ Back to topMailChimp for WooCommerce Memberships helps you communicate more effectively with the members on your site. Previously, to get member data set up in MailChimp, you had to perform CSV exports for members, upload these exports to MailChimp, and manually change merge tags to be able to create effective member segments.
Try WooCommerce Memberships today
↑ Back to topWe hope you’ve enjoyed reading about WooCommerce Memberships. Give it a try for yourself, or get more tips on how to build a memberships site.
Do you have any questions about WooCommerce Memberships? Want to know if your idea will work with this brand new extension? Let us know what you’re curious about in the comments below.
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Awesome, awesome, awesome!!!
I’ve been waiting for this! So glad it’s here 🙂
This looks great.
Can you sell memberships to groups – where there’s a master/primary user (who handles payment and account admin), and subusers (who have access to restricted content etc. but can’t view/ deal with the account details)
Thanks!
Hi Henry, we’re developing a Subscription Gifting extension already that will work with WooCommerce Subscriptions and Memberships. Specifically, it allows one person to buy and manage subscriptions for another person (who can also suspend/cancel the subscription).
It’s not ready for testing yet, but I can share the specification document with you as we’d love feedback on whether it will meet your requirements or if we’ve missed something.
If you’d like access to the spec doc, please contact WooThemes support and mention this comment or fill in the contact form at Prospress.com
Hi Brent
That sounds truly awesome – really need that extension. Will for sure drop a message in your contact form.
Hi Brent,
I’m really interested to hear more about the “a Subscription Gifting extension” – any news or updates on a potential release date?
Hey all! As developers of the extensions, we’d like to clarify a couple things:
This is definitely possible, but requires that Subscriptions is active, as it uses the free trial period generated in Subscriptions. The same goes for delaying access to content until after the trial — this option is not available unless Subscriptions is used.
On its own, Memberships lets you sell unlimited or set-length (i.e., memberships) without trial periods.
To clarify, notes are emails to your member and are not in the “My Memberships” area.
Happy to hang out here and answer any pre-sales Qs!
-Beka
Hey Beka, thanks for those details. I’ve updated the post to clarify.
Awesome, thanks 😀 this was a great overview Nicole, thanks for the writeup!
Looks awesome, guys. If ONLY it had come out two months ago! I just did two members-only content sites back to back, haha.
My favorite feature about this versus having to use Groups is that the featured image, title, and excerpt can be made visible to non-members. That’s exactly what I wanted, but Groups can’t do it.
My god your pricing is crazy. $200 plus $100 every year for just a membership extension!? Do you guys understand that a great majority of people can’t afford woo extensions at these prices or do you just not care anymore? I’ve purchased approx 50 extensions with my account and my annual cost is $1300/ year just for woo updates. I can’t maintain your high costs and after seeing this, I’ll be seeking out alternatives to woo as this is yet another plugin extension far exceeding a fair price. It’s like you guys have the attitude of “well if you’re going to make some money off of our plugin, you’d better be ready to pay up…” Your pricing model is ridiculous.
Pricey is relative. I’ve spent uncounted hours so far this year cleaning-up messes on my sites caused by cheap, crummy software. $100/year is a bargain.
@lily if you can’t afford $100/mo on business expenses I think your pricing model needs to be reworked. The functionality you can build into a site with this plugin is a steal at this price.
This plugin represents thousands of dollars of investment and work. Your ‘alternatives’ will most likely cost more and be of less quality.
Cheers on the release Woo and SkyVerge!
Yup. Cheap software costs less in dollars, but *way* more in time and frustration – at least that’s been my experience.
Looks awesome! I have a question. If I already have posts that are protected by Groups I have created will the posts automatically be protected by the Memberships if I import members from Groups? Or will I have to go back and add the Post to the appropriate membership.
Also can the Groups plugin also be active and running alongside this plugin?
Thanks,
John
Hey John, the import from Groups will only import members, not your restriction rules. You’ll need to add these restrictions via membership plans, then remove them from Groups.
You can definitely run both plugins together though! We anticipated that users might have Groups plugins or other tie-ins, and if you want members to be in both a membership / group, be sure you’ve tied membership and group access to the same product 🙂
Ok great! Look forward to checking it out.
This looks very promising!
Does this also allow you to protect a WordPress-based forum (Bbpress or simple-press for example)?
And does it provide options for redirecting members on login and other functions like that?
(Or are these functionalities maybe planned for a later release?)
Cheers! 🙂
Hey Nick, Memberships lets you protect custom post types, so bbPress will work! We do have a more detailed integration between the two planned, and we’re working on getting a roadmap with some voting set up so we can see what’s most important to users.
Login currently works the same as the default WooCommerce login (the membership is tied to a customer account), but would love to hear what kind of changes you’d be looking for.
It’s really great to read about the focus here on bbPress. I think the heyday that forums had in the late 90s and 00s can really brought back with much greater quality and community engagement with pricing models that use WooSubscriptions and Memberships.
Thanks for the reply!
In terms of redirection. I’d love to setup a custom page members get redirected to after logging in. (Like a dashboard page). This is also possible to do with a plugin like “ProfilePress” or some other redirection plugin – but to have it included would probably avoid compatibility issues.
It could even be useful to have the option to create a custom redirect page, per membership level (for users that offer multiple tiers).
Another thing that’d be great is separate menu’s (like you can do with “Nav Menu Roles”) for logged in and logged out users (or show certain menu items based on membership level).
Looking forward to the roadmap! 🙂
Hey Nick, thanks for this feedback — very much appreciated 🙂 We’ll check these out for our roadmap.
I could see a “dashboard” page, but probably not one that’s tied to the level; as a customer can have multiple memberships, there wouldn’t be a way to “pick” which page is used.
Menus is something I’m also going to add to feature voting; it’s messy to try to show / hide certain menu items (WP doesn’t give you a good way to do this), but an entirely custom menu could be a possibility. Cheers!
Another amazing release from SkyVerge; well worth the wait/price. 🙂
Looks great – Thanks Woo and SkyVerge. Quick question. I am looking for an option to allow wholesale pricing for select customers. It won’t be a blanket discount but rather dictated by prod category. Is memberships the best option or should be looking at something simpler?
Hey RuthBT, Memberships will let you set a discount for all products, specific products, or an entire product category. This could be a very simple wholesale solution. If you’d need something more advanced or with more flexibility for other kinds of pricing rules, Dynamic Pricing is an excellent choice. This would be my recommendation if you’re okay with some setup, as it gives you more to build on in terms of pricing in the future.
Goodness, this is certainoy an extensive plugin, I cant wait to impliment it!
Hey Beka and folks at SkyVerge,
Can you clarify for me:
Does this plugin in any way supercede the need the various plugins you’ve mentioned in your wholesale related articles here: https://www.sellwithwp.com/?s=wholesale
Wholesale isn’t mentioned specifically for this plugin, but I’m wondering based on this write-up if it’s a useful plugin for wholesale and whether to expect an article or two on the process over at SellWithWP?
Cheers!
Hey Greg, glad to hear you’re a SWP reader as well 😀
Memberships could certainly be used for very simple wholesale — see the comment to RuthBT. However, Dynamic Pricing is still probably a better fit, as it gives you a lot more flexibility for your pricing rules as your site grows. As with all things, it depends on what you need and what you think you might need in the future.
We’ll be writing about it for sure, will add the idea of using it as a wholesale system to the SWP idea board 🙂
Thanks for the reply Beka!
Dynamic Pricing is certainly on our list of plugins that could fit the bill.
This might not be the best place to ask, but do you know if either Memberships or Dynamic Pricing (possibly with Groups plugin if required) would allow wholesale customers to be “privy” to one (category, tag, product) of discount, but not another.
As an example:
Two wholesale customers: Bob’s Beer Shop & Cathy’s Cake Shop.
Bob sees wholesale price for malty beverages but simply the retail price for cakes.
Cathy sees full price for beers, but her wholesale rate (or dynamic wholesale rate (quantity breaks, etc.)) rates for cakes.
Cheers!
Hey Greg, I’m pretty sure Dynamic Pricing could do this with either user roles or the Groups plugin, but I’d get in touch with the pre-sales team to confirm.
Does this replace Groups at all, or should I keep using Groups to assign customers to certain content after purchase?
I am also curious about groups and how they were working with say Sensei, this seems like a slicker option for a Sensei powered website but is the groups plugin doing something extra here or maybe a switch to this plugin is worth it in the long run?
Not sure if Groups does anything in particular with Sensei, but Dan did give Memberships + Sensei a whirl to confirm they work together 🙂 If any improvements are needed for better Sensei support we’d also be happy to add them.
I can confirm that Memberships and Sensei do indeed play nice together. I’ve already ditched Groups and am using Memberships to control access to “extra premium” lesson pages in my courses.
Works like a charm 😉
Cheers David and Skyverge for the heads up, seems like its time to get membership up and running 🙂 thanks for your time.
David,
Could you clarify which “groups” you and others are referring to? Is it:
Groups: http://wordpress.org/plugins/groups, or
Groups for WooCommerce: http://woocommerce.com/products/groups-woocommerce/ ?
Thanks.
It’s both, Richard. “Groups” allows you to segment your wordpress users into, well, groups and set specific access permissions for each user group.
Groups for Woocommerce allows you to assign users to a group automatically after a specific purchase.
This combination allows for a kind of “membership” scenario on any website. It works, but it’s clunky. This new Memberships plugin is much more streamlined and easy to use.
If you’re only using Groups to restrict your content, you could replace it with Memberships. If you’ve got other integrations with Groups (i.e., coupons), you could run the two plugins side-by-side, and grant access to both groups and memberships via the same products.
Any chance of getting this awesome looking extension to work multi site style? Basically, store is on one subdomain but it controls membership access on a separate members only subdomain.
That would make it…incredible.
Hey Michael, afraid that’s not currently possible 🙁 Restrictions will only work on a per-site basis.
That would have been my ideal set up too.
Too bad this wasn’t available last year when I was building my membership site, it would’ve saved me so time.
Interesting plugin.
May I ask two things, please ?
Can this plugin
– restrict contents not to group but to one precise user (with a valid paid membership) at a time
– inform a user (with a valid paid membership) that new content is available to him and can be downloaded from the website ?
The need, for my project, is to sell a membership in order to receive personalized service, and provide weekly reports on how the service is going.
Honestly, I’m not sure the present plugin would do that job, but I haven’t yet found THE wordpress solution to achieve it…
“restrict contents not to group but to one precise user (with a valid paid membership) at a time” — You could do this, but you’d need to create a unique membership for this user if you wanted them to be the only one that had access.
“inform a user (with a valid paid membership) that new content is available to him and can be downloaded from the website” — Right now your site will have notices to tell users when they get access, but there’s no notification that content is available. This could be achieved via custom code, and we’ll look at adding to the idea board.
Thank you SkyVerge for your answer, but in that case I fear your plugin is not the proper system that I need.
In my case, it’s about having a growing number of customers, and each of them are treated individually, and are given their own document(s) when I upload them to the site. There’s little interaction to be had once the customer is a member, I submit reports, the customer may request by mail or phone changes or adjustements, this is it.
Would your company have a better suited plugin, maybe ?
I risk nothing in asking 🙂
Hey Oliver, maybe using the customer order notes could help then, as you can send download links (which can be from your media folder or something like Dropbox) via the order to the customer as there’s no member content to manage.
Is BuddyPress supported?
I’d love so see a side-by-side comparison with the groups plugin to gain a better understanding of the advantages of each.
Ask and you shall receive 🙂 Comparison doc here
Sweet! That’s exactly what I was looking for as well.
Thanks for great plugin, is it applicable on all version of woocommerce?
Memberships requires WooCommerce 2.2 or newer.
2 questions –
1) I have an existing membership site setup. Will I be able to import my existing members into Membership and assign them access to the appropriate products/memberships? Some of these have already signed up using Subscriptions – will their subscription charges continue to go through??
2) is there functionality to support automatically adding new Members to email lists (Aweber specifically)?
1) The ability to import depends on how your site is setup currently. If you already use WooCommerce, you can either (a) import members from Groups, or (b) grant access based on previous purchases (i.e., give a silver membership to anyone who has purchased Product A).
If a customer has purchased a Subscription, you can use the previous purchase import to grant access, i.e., give a silver membership to anyone who has purchased Subscription A — this will only grant access for active subscriptions. It changes nothing about the subscription, just ties the membership to it.
2) Not yet, but you could definitely do it with custom code.
I currently use Stripe as my payment processor. I need to know if I can manually add clients to this extension and edit information that will reflect in Stripe.
For example: I previously used DAP and recently converted to WC Subscriptions. With WC Memberships, will it allow me to manually enter my old DAP clients and still match up their billing to the Stripe payment profile they already have?
I realize I can’t import my DAP clients, but would need to manually enter the old clients and still sync to Stripe for processing without having to make the members re-register. Any info would be appreciated.
Memberships can be tied to subscriptions, so any info you’ve converted will still show up 🙂 Purchase details will look exactly as they do now for a product or subscription purchase; Memberships doesn’t change any billing details since it always uses the default WooCommerce checkout, and just lets you tie membership access to the purchase.
A few questions:
1) Can I use this to sell access to my Sensei courses and limit their access to only 1 year?
2) Can use I this to sell access to a premium, paid forum using bbpress and buddypress? I’m assuming Subscriptions would have to be a part of that, but is it possible to sell access to the forum with a monthly fee using this?
Thanks!
Hey Tim, 1) Memberships does indeed work well with Sensei, and you can limit access to courses and other content by expiring the membership after a year 🙂
2) bbPress forum restrictions should work, and we do have improvements to bbPress integration on our roadmap. BuddyPress should work as well, but I’m not very familiar with it myself. If you use it and have suggestions for how they can work better together, we’re all ears 😀
Great plugin, and I especially like your comparison table. Very useful stuff.
Has the plugin been tested / used in a WPML extended multi-language and multi-currency installation?
Tx,
Frank
Would be great to see a post giving some details about how Memberships works with Sensei. I see it being a substitute for both groups and drip. Lot’s of talk about groups here but I’m not sure about Memership versus Sensei drip. I’d prefer and all in one solution.
This looks great. Congratulations SkyVerge and Woo!
Thanks so much Nirav!
Is it compatible with BuddyPress ?
Hey Gazmir, please see the response to Tim above we’ve just added 🙂
Hi just a question, will members who logged in be able to see both “before member price” and “after member price” on the front end? This will let them know how much they are saving instead of displaying only the member price.
Hey Alan, members will see a “member discount” flash (like a sales flash) and the member price only, not the original price. This is great feedback though, so I’ve put it on our list to investigate!
Is there the ability to display members? Like a Members Directory Listing? Only visible to paid members?
Afraid not, Memberships currently focuses on restricting content and shop integrations rather than a directory. Ultimate Member and BuddyPress are probably good solutions to check out if the directory will be your focus.
I might be missing something, but is there a way to set a discount per product, that is not limited to whole numbers?
@ /wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=wc_membership_plan and then selecting Purchasing Discounts, there seems to be but when you click on Purchasing Discounts, but when you add the rule you get a validation message stating ” Please enter a valid value. The two nearest valid values are x and x”
Only whole numbers, and no “cents” can be added.
Plugin looks great so far, just need to be able to offer the discount I wanted to 🙂
Thanks for the hard work, and it hands down beats any other wp membership plugin out there.
Hey Gregory, so sorry about this! It’s indeed a bug, as we didn’t add the 0.01 step to the input. Thanks for pointing this out — it will be patched up in the next release.
Thanks so much for the kind words as well 😀 your support means a ton to our team and so great to hear Memberships is working out for you!
This looks very interesting. We are building a membership site where we need to approve each membership request before accepting payment. – This is for a professional body / organisation. Is there a way to add an approval stage to the membership process?
Thanks
Hey Alastair, your best bet here would likely be to have those interested in a membership contact you via a form, and then you could approve them and extend a membership to them (and request payment) manually via the admin options.
Another option, if you wanted to automate it a little more, would be to use WooCommerce Subscriptions as well, and publicly offer a membership that starts with a free trial (say, 14 days). This way the potential member wouldn’t be billed and you would have plenty of time to review their application and either allow them to proceed into the paid stage or deny them. This would need to be supported by additional language on the page, however, so from a customer standpoint I don’t think it’s as clear as the other approach.
If you’d like, feel free to let us know about your idea or browse the WooCommerce Memberships roadmap here: http://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-memberships-roadmap/ If there’s enough interest, this might be something that is added in a future release!
Thanks for the response. Will download a copy and stare to build with the second option I think.
Sounds good! If you run into any hiccups, support is only a few clicks away and would love to help you out. 🙂
Looks great. Are you planning a webinar anytime soon to go over primary features? Would love to see it work. And how it differs from some of the other top ones out there.
Hey, sorry if this was addressed and I missed it, but would this enable the ability to have numerous sellers and any amount of public buyers on one site? The numerous sellers is the important part. Basically I need a way to sellers to be able to manage their own “shop”, so to speak. Thanks!
Hi there with the memberships plugin I am wondering if people can sign up to a free account just like we do here at Woothemes. Just want to check this before purchasing quite a few plugins. Thank you.
Article très instructif… 🙂