The WooCommerce Memberships extension has been released, and was developed by the team at SkyVerge. Memberships have historically not been very easy with WooCommerce, and this will undoubtedly be a popular extension.
I’m using Memberships on Post Status already to manage Deals, and am rolling it out to tackle Notes and Resources as well, which currently use some pretty crude redirects and nothing more.
Memberships has a lot of handy features. A couple that are particularly nice:
- Multiple memberships. Users aren’t limited to one membership on the site.
- Content restriction is built in, obviously, but you can also drip access to the content over time (via the site itself, not currently by email, I don’t think).
- Memberships can be manually created or tied to a purchase or subscription.
- Better yet, existing subscribers (using the Subscriptions plugin) can be synced with Memberships.
- You can set product discounts for folks with Memberships. I’ll be doing this for my job board, or you can do it with a buying club or even a wholesale store where wholesale purchasers are “buyers”.
There are a lot of good uses for Memberships, and it will obviously go well with the Subscriptions extension as well. I have a lot to say about running a membership website after five months of running the Post Status Club, and I’ll do so at some point in the next few months.
If you are looking to run a very simple membership website, you may not choose WooCommerce, but for a site where you want serious customization potential or have other styles of products beyond your membership, this extension makes WooCommerce considerably more appealing and less scary than before.
