Anyone who gets serious about marketing their own info-products will start taking a close look at product delivery and membership options, sooner or later. There’s no shortage of product delivery platforms out there, and with the recent Kajabi launch, it’s en vogue to talk about them. In this article (warning: it’s loooong), I go into detail about product delivery, talk about which solutions are good, which are bad and what you should consider for your own products and membership sites.
I’ll also give you a detailed run-down of the four platforms I have personally had a close look at (i.e. I’ve used them and seen them “from the inside”): aMember Pro, Digital Access Pass (DAP), Kajabi, Nanacast, Premium Web Cart, FusionHQ and 1ShoppingCart.
Read on to learn pretty much everything you need to know about product delivery and membership sites, all in one post.
Dear Marketer, You’re Doing it Wrong
Concerning information products online, my impression is that about 90% of it is done very, very sloppily. Take your typical ClickBank product: These usually consist of only about a dozen html pages. You’ve got a squeeze page, a sales-page and your typical disclaimers, affilaite pages, privacy policy and so on. That’s the “front end”, what the general public gets to see. More often than not, once you’ve made a purchase, all you get are a bunch of download links on yet another html page, and that’s it. Often, this page isn’t even protected in any way (meaning that anyone can access it, even if they didn’t purchase).
This is pretty horrible, in terms of product delivery. It’s also often the case that the PDF documents are unappealing and sloppily formatted and the videos are boring, long-winded and badly produced.
This is bad product delivery. Too many product creators assume that it’s all just about the pure content, the information, and not at all about the “packaging” of that content. But the human brain does not work like that.
The marketing message in the Kajabi launch got one thing right when it emphasized how important the quality of your delivery is for the perceived value of your product. Not only that, it’s also important for the learning process your customers go through with your material. I’ll not go into details, but I’m sure it’s not a stretch for anyone to imagine that well put-together and intelligently, beautifully delivered content is more actionable than a sloppy PDF.
But of course, good product delivery is about more than just aesthetics.
What to Consider for Product and Membership Solutions
Here are all the points that need to be considered and that make a good, solid delivery system:
Autoresponder Integration
I’m putting this first because it’s absolutely vital that you get all your customers on a mailing list. Not only is a list of customers your most valuable asset, it’s also important that you can follow-up with them for non-marketing purposes: Letting them know about new content, updates, bug-fixes etc.
While all-in-one solutions are usually a good thing and you don’t want to need to integrate too many parts, when it comes to the autoresponder, you want to be using a third-party service. Making sure that your broadcast mailings are safely delivered to inboxes, making sure your sender address and IP aren’t added to blacklists etc. is a big and complex task and you want it to be in the hands of people who do nothing else. A product delivery system that comes with an integrated autoresponder for some basic features (sending password reminder e-mails, for example) is good, but you definitely want a solid and seamless integration with an autoresponder like Aweber, iContact or GetResponse (to name just a few), for handling your actual list and e-mail marketing.
Payment Processing / Shopping Cart Integration
The payment processing is a similar topic to the autoresponder integration. A third party service is generally preferable, because that leaves the complexity of payment processing up to “the pros”. But it is vitally important that the payment process is integrated with your delivery system as seamlessly as possible.
For one thing, it needs to work 100% of the time. That goes without saying. Having a seamless process, without too many clicks and pageloads required and without the payment pages looking completely different from the order pages, is also very important. Ideally, a membership site software should integrate with PayPal and support many different merchant accounts and payment gateways as well.
Good: The customer fills out one form to complete the payment and is automatically given access to the product/membership as well as added to the autoresponder.
Bad: The customer fills out one form to do the payment, reaches a new page where they have to fill out a second form to access the product and finally reach yet another page where they need to fill a form to be added to the autoresponder… (yes, I’ve seen it this bad).
Upsell, Downsell, Cross-Sell Management
This really comes down to the shopping cart features of any given platform. There are many ways in which upsells and downsells are handled, especially when it comes to “one-click” features (meaning the customer doesn’t have to enter the payment information and go through checkout twice to get an upsell or downsell). One-click usually works through a shopping cart system where the customer can add several items to the cart before checking out. In this case, it’s important that the shopping cart can either be integrated into your existing website or customized to match the look and feel of your website, otherwise it will visually break the flow and might cause confusion (“Am I still on the same website?”).
Upsells and downsells are a matter of redirecting the customer to specific pages, depending on their actions, and managing different products/memberships and their corresponding buy-now-buttons or order forms.
Content Protection
Your content delivery system should be protecting your content, so that non-customers cannot access it and it cannot simply be found via search engines. A good system should allow very easy to set up protection for all your on-page content, your downloadable content and your streaming content. At the same time, it’s very important that the protection is implemented in a way that is non-annoying for the users. The worst example I’ve ever encountered was a setup where the system asked me to login again every single time I tried to navigate to a new page or refresh the page I was already looking at…
In short, the content protecton should be easy to set up, impenetrable to “outsiders” and as un-noticable to your paying customers as possible.
Content Scheduling
This is mainly a concern for membership sites. In most cases, you’ll want to be able to “drip out” content to your members. A good system should be flexible enough to allow for “all at once” access as well as individual, scheduled and tiered acces for each member, depending on their join date and membership level. It should also be up to you whether members see none of the future content, an outline of it or all of it. Finally, it can be a nice bonus if you can set up the membership site to show “teasers” of the content to non-members and full content only to members.
Another important aspect is how a delivery system deals with cancellations: Members need to be able to access the content for at least the rest of the period they paid for (i.e. if they pay for 30 days and cancel on day five, the system should give them another 25 days of access). Even better is if members who cancel can still, at any time, access all content up to the point of their cancellation.
Affiliate Management
One thing is for certain: If you’re marketing info products, you need an affiliate program. Affilates can make all the difference in info-marketing. Depending on your business-model, this can go two ways. If you are only selling a few products and especially if those products are unrelated, then you’re probably best served with a third-party affiliate program such as ClickBank, PaySpree or DigiResults. In this case, it’s important that the product delivery solution integrates smoothly with these third-party affiliate programs.
However, if you are running a full-fledged info-business with lots of products and product ranges, you will very likely want to have your own affiliate management system for various reasons. One of the main reasons for me personally is that a “global” affiliate program is absolutely crucial for me. In other words, if someone sends me a lead, then I want them to get credit for any and all purchases that lead makes from my product catalogue. That makes the deal more attractive for affiliates and it’s also a fairer solution than what you get with something like ClickBank. Another thing to keep in mind is that affiliate networks charge a “per sale” fee. If you are selling products by the thousands, having your own affiliate management system can save you a lot of money.
Of course, tracking needs to be bullet-proof, redirects need to be fast and stats need to be detailed. If you can offer multi-tiered affiliate payouts, that’s an extra bonus as well.
Ease of Use
This is one of the biggest challenges, when it comes to product delivery systems. On the one hand, you obviously want to system to be feature-rich and flexible and to do pretty much whatever you want it to do. On the other hand, the more sophisticated and complex a software is, the more complicated and less user-friendly it tends to be.
For non-coders, this can often mean having to spend extra cash on hiring professionals to set up and configure membership site for them. Ideally, a system should find a good compromise between flexibilty and ease of use.
Why not just use ClickBank?
ClickBank and co are useful platforms for certain things and if you’re only releasing one product, they are the best solution. However, if you are setting up a product portfolio and/or membership sites, you need a better system. For one thing, most public affiliate networks don’t offer any kind of content protection.
As soon as you make a substantial amount of sales, a platfrom of your own can also save you a lot in fees.
Another argument for the use of, say, ClickBank is that there are already tons of affiliates there, that might find and decide to promote your products. Unfortunately, it’s not like you can add your product to CB and then get an army of superaffliates promoting it, with no extra work on your part. No matter where you place your product, you’ll always have to get in the trenches and recruit affilaites yourself.
Difference Between ‘Shopping Cart’ and ‘Membership Software’
What’s the difference?
Shopping carts are primarily made for ecommerce stores and while they can be used for selling digital products, they are usually not ideal for this purpose. In a shopping cart system, you generally get to set up products with images and product descriptions and assign prices to them. When the customer purchases an item, it usually takes them to a shopping-cart page, rather than straight to the checkout. Also, since ecommerce is based on shipping out physical goods, content protection is a non-issue and therefore not part of most shopping carts.
This is not to say that all shopping carts are automatically useless for digital product delivery. There are dozens of solutions available and they can be suitable for this purpose to varying degrees.
On the other hand, membership site software is mainly concerned with securing online content, usually with different membership levels and “content dripping”. My personal recommendation is to use membership software to deliver products, even if they are one-time paid products. I believe in offering more than just an ebook and there’s no better way of offering all your content, streaming media and download links on a nicely designed membership site.
Next, let’s get into the nitty-gritty on all the membership and product delivery platforms that I’ve personally tested and have a look at their pros and cons.
1ShoppingCart
1ShoppingCart is one of the solutions that’s been around forever, one of the “old dogs”, so to speak. 1SC is something of an all-in-one solution, combining payment processing, shopping cart software, and affiliate management component and even an autoresponder.
Looking through the extensive dashboard, you’ll quickly notice that 1SC is clearly more geared towards e-commerce and the selling of physical goods than your typical info-marketing and selling of digital courses and media. That’s not to say that the latter is not possible with 1ShoppingCart, but you’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the optimal solutions (and instructions) for selling digital media. However, there is an integrated solution for protecting digital content, although it seems quite limited. What you can do is specify files to be made accessible after a purchase, including unique licenses for the purchaser and expiring download links. If you want to deliver content on a membership-style platform, you will have to integrate 1SC with a membershi site software to do that.
Concerning the integrated autoresponder in 1ShoppingCart, it seems to be a perfect example of what I described above: While you can use the 1SC autoresponder, it’s probably better to go with a 3rd party solution. I can’t say that I tested the 1SC autoresponder myself, but I have heard terrible things about it.
Overall, 1ShoppingCart is very feature-rich and well-integrated, especially when it comes to payment processing. Despite this, I believe it’s not the optimal solution for information marketers.
aMember Pro
Amember Pro is a membership software that can be used for standalone products just as easily as for continuity programs. If you regularly buy internet marketing related products, it’s very likely that you’ve gone through an aMember checkout or two, as it’s quite a popular solution.
It’s biggest strength is probably that it has a very good affiliate management system (allows global affiliate commissions across many products) and that it is, in a sense, very feature-rich and flexible. I write “in a sense” because where aMember falls short is with integration and ease of use. To really turn aMember into a good, seamless solution, you either need to be a programmer or hire one. Even the standard setup for a product can be quite daunting for the non-technical.
In terms of integration, aMember can basically integrate with anything – autoresponders, CMS like WordPress, vBulletin, you name it. Unfortunately, integration usually requires an additional plugin and often, these plugins are third-party plugins (i.e. not created and supported by the creators of aMember).
Personally, I was shocked to find that aMember does not integrate with Aweber or other autoresponders out-of-the-box. And the creators don’t even provide an official plugin for this. This necessity for plugins means two things:
1. The more customized your aMember is, the more potential “weak links” it has, where integration could go awry and wreck your entire setup.
2. Amember is much more expensive than it seems at first glance, since you’ll have to pay for plugins and quite possibly also for setup and customization.
I had an interesting discussion with Jesus Perez, a guy who specializes in local business marketing and knows far more about membership solutions than I ever will (because he sets them up for his clients). He told me of the many troubles caused by aMember plugin monsters when one part of the system gets and upgrade and suddenly, the plugins stop working. Then, you’re at the mercy of the third-party providers to deliver an update as quickly as possible (which they may or may not do).
Apart from all that, a personal issue I had with aMember is that you have to know quite a bit of coding to even just make the standard signup- login- and membership-pages look nice. The regular design is simply unappealing.
Digital Access Pass
Digital Access Pass, or DAP, is specifically made for membership sites on WordPress. While this can be a bit of a limitation (especially concerning the platform), it’s actually a very smart choice on the side of the creators. DAP does WordPress integration better than any other solution I’ve seen or know of.
It’s fairly easy to use – there is a learning curve, of course, but even I could master with only two or three support tickets posted (and that’s saying something). Among the highlights of it’s (very long) feature list are:
- Digital Access Pass gives you all sorts of options for dripping out content to your members on multiple membership levels. You can hide your membership content from non-member completely or show teasers of the content, you can set up a free membership level with limited access etc. etc.
- DAP lets members who cancel access all the content that they’ve already paid for. I.e. when a member cancels during month 3, they will still be able to access all the content from the first 3 months of the membership, but nothing else. This is an awesome way to be super-cool to your customers.
- DAP lets you set commissions for your affiliates in all sorts of ways. You can pay per lead or pay per sale. You can choose to pay 100% commissions (great for viral promotions) and you can set special commission levels for your best affiliates (attract super-affiliates with exclusive, higher commissions) and much more.
You can access all DAP features from within WordPress and since the integration is so seamless, it’s very easy to create beautiful product and membership delivery with DAP: All you need is a good WordPress Theme. The login-screens, membership area, product access, user profiles and everything else is placed within your WordPress site, so you don’t have to worry about styling.
The biggest weakness in DAP are the affiliate stats – these are so bare-bones that they might as well not exist. Digital Access Pass does not give you a clear idea abou who’s sending you traffic, how much they are sending, what conversions they are getting… (although I’m told this will be addressed in their next update).
I also noticed that quite often, the customers did not receive their login data automatically. This might have been a problem with the Aweber integration or a problem with Aweber itself, I can’t be sure.
Kajabi
It took me a while before I “got” what Kajabi is really good for. Kajabi is a super-simplified solution that is made for people who don’t have their own ideas about product delivery.
It may seem condescending of me to put it that way, but it’s not at all: Whether you have your own ideas about product delivery or not simply depends on where your focus lies. If you are a control-freak (like me) and you have a strong focus on your marketing and your product delivery, then Kajabi is probably not for you. If your focus is more on your products themselves, on your community or any other aspect of your business, then Kajabi might well be a very good solution for you.
To put it differently: If you think “I want a product delivery platform that does X, Y and Z.” then Kajabi probably won’t fit. If you think “I want to sell my info-product, but don’t know how.” then Kajabi is perfect, because it does all that for you (more or less, anyway).
Kajabi has one particular way of doing everything. You get one type of sales-page, one type of product delivery, one type of design etc. This can be great, because you no longer need to worry about those factors. And yes, I know it’s customizable, but it’s customizable to have different “feels” for one and the same “look”.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous video and article about Kajabi, this platform has some absolutely brilliant features in terms of what kind of sales-funnels you can set up with it and what community features it offers. Unfortunately, the pricing is very steep and due to limitations on how many products and customers you can have, it’s heavily skewed towards marketers who sell high-priced products and memberships and against marketers who sell one-off products at lower prices and like to give out lots of free-line content.
Second-biggest weakness: No affiliate management. This makes the product a no-go for now. An affiliate module will be added later on, though. This is a very young product and it’s reasonable to expect it will evolve and improve over time.
Biggest weakness: Complete loss of data upon cancellation. The policy is clear: There’s no easy way to export data and as soon as you stop paying, it’s all gone.
Nanacast
Nanacast is a hosted solution, just like Kajabi. Instead of having the bells and whistles out front, Nanacast has all it’s power and potential under the hood. Nanacast has such a ridiculously huge array of features, it’s impossible to convey in an article like this one. Let it just be said that every feature related to memberships, product delivery and ecommerce that you can possibly imagine is likely to be in there, along with lots of features you never even thought of.
Integration with payment processors and autoresponders is also part of the package and for the latter Nanacast can even unsubscribe cancelled customers from your autoresponder’s customer list and move them to a different list.
They also offer state-of-the-art affiliate tracking and more stats than most of us can make use of. You get the idea: This thing is the 800lbs features-gorilla.
You can host all of your pages with Nanacast and have it do the entire delivery. However, unless you do some heavy html and CSS editing (you can add html content to all pages), it will all look quite ugly. Luckily, Nanacast also integrates with WordPress through a very simple plugin. Surprisingly, the WordPress integration is not quite as deep and complex as, well, everything else in Nanacast, but it gets the job done.
In short, this service has pretty much all the boxes ticked and it’s only downside is a the learning curve, as you’ll initally be overwhelmed by the complexity of the system and the interface isn’t particularly user-friendly.
Premium Web Cart
Premium Web Cart seems to have been primarily concieved as an e-commerce solution, however it’s also suitable for info-product marketing as it comes with a ton of features, membership and affiliate management as well as a seamless integration with the Wishlist Member WordPress plugin.
Premium Web Cart boasts a very user-friendly interface and a lot of detailed instruction videos (although most of those are clearly geared towards e-commerce). It does not come with any content management system (i.e. website builder) or any of it’s own pages. PWC is meant to be used on your existing website, rather than being a system that builds the website for you.
In terms of features and functionality, PWC is very impressive. In addition to your “usual” array of features, it also comes with a popup-creator, a coupon system, live chat and “click-to-call” functionality, an analytics solution and a support-ticket system.
If you are starting out and want a ton of features plus a user-friendly interface, Premium Web Cart is an excellent platform.
FusionHQ
FusionHQ is an all-in-one solution that most closely resembles Kajabi, out of all the systems presented here. It handles products, membership sites, sales-funnels, content-protection, shopping-cart and autoresponder integration,… the lot.
In FusionHQ, you start out by either creating a product or a membership site (there’s a drag-and-drop site-builder included) and then setting up a “process”. The process is basically your sales-funnel and it can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. You can create squeeze-pages and sales-pages using a large collection of templates, graphics and a drag-and-drop editor. FusionHQ also handles upsells, downsells and exit-popups out of the box and all these can be added to your process with relative ease.
Just like Kajabi, the only downside to a system like this is that it’s best if you don’t have too concrete a vision of what you want your membership and product delivery to look like, as a FusionHQ user, because it has a certain way of doing things and the pages and sites all have a certain “FusionHQ-look” to them. For most users, this is not a real problem, though. Also, you can import any custom HTML pages you want to use and edit the HTML of any of the pre-formatted pages in the system – this means that for advanced users, the system is extremely flexible. FusionHQ also comes with a WordPress plugin, which I unfortunately could not get to work on any of my test-sites, at the time of writing. I will update this section once the issues have been resolved.
FusionHQ is currently not yet available to the public. Once it’s released to the public, it looks like it could become the long-awaited one-stop solution and true Kajabi alternative for many marketers.
Overview and Comparison
On the downside, the digital download protection it offers is… well, not exactly to my liking and it does not come with any kind of membership site model. For the record: I included it in this roundup because it’s so well known and I got asked about it a lot. Having said that, it’s worth mentioning that 1SC does integrate with several membership site programs.
From what I’ve heard, I’d stay away from their autoresponder.
Price: Starter $34/month, Basic $59/month, Professional $99/month
All the standard pages aMember creates are pretty ugly, but customizable. WordPress integration is flexible and seems solid enough.
Overall the biggest downside of aMember is that it is too complicated and too reliant on (often third-party) plugins, which makes it a high-maintenance solution with too many potential points of failure.
Price: $180
Digital Access Pass is one of the user-friendliest solutions of the bunch, not least because of the extensive and well-sturctured knowledgebase, which includes many detailed video-tutorials.
DAP’s biggets strength is how well and easily it integrates with WordPress. You can simply use a nice-looking theme and add the DAP specific date (like user accounts, signup-fields etc.) using short-codes and end up with a professional looking membership or product-delivery site. Content protection is solid and easy to use, as well.
My biggest issue with DAP was a severe lack of detail when it comes to affiliate stats. Having said that, in every other way DAP is a very good choice.
Price: Single Site $167, Multi-Site: $297
Kajabi is all about flashy presentation, but also puts a lot of emphasis on user-friendliness.
Of all products tested, it certainly creates the most beautiful sales-pages and membership areas, without further customization. The fact that it is cloud-hosted and boasts some smart media delivery functions is nice, but those aren’t important features for most users (who won’t generate server-melting traffic anyway).
The biggest downsides, are the pricing and the lack of an affiliate system, which makes the product pretty much useless, at this point. After all, if you are looking for an expensive product deliver solution that needs to be integrated with all other components (payment processing, affiliate system, autoresponder…), there are more than enough options available.
Price: $99/month, $199/month, $299/month
Nanacast is not the easiest platform to get acquainted with. The user interface, as well as the entire system, are geared towards maximum functionality, not user-friendliness.
I personally don’t use the hosted pages for Nanacast, since I like to have my content A) sitting on my own servers and B) look nice (which I use WordPress for).
Nanacast shines with a very good affiliate management system and just generally very good features concerning integration, payment processing etc. If it were just slightly more affordable, it would be the ultimate choice for anyone.
Price: $97/month, $147/month
Premium Web Cart offers an amazing array of features at a lower price-point than most of it’s competitors. That alone makes it worth a second look.
To be honest, PWC is the solution I would have personally chosen, if I didn’t already have many of my product/membership sites set up and ready to go in WordPress. PWC’s own membership system is quite good, if you start with it from scratch. As is it’s affiliate management system and the slew of other features it offers.
Price: $40/month, $80/month, $100/month
FusionHQ is a very complete all-in-one solution for serious product creators. Priced at $97/month, it’s an extremely comprehensive system at a more than reasonable price. Yes, you can get all the features in FusionHQ using other systems and tools as well, but it will cost a small fortune and you’d have to make them all work together.
In short, it looks like FusionHQ is the system that Kajabi claimed to be. From setting up a very simple sales-funnel in just a few minutes, to integrating a complex funnel with upsells, downsells and exit-pops and leading it all into a stylish, multi-tiered WordPress based membership site, there seems to be nothing product-delivery related that FusionHQ doesn’t handle.
Price: $97/month
Honourable Mentions
Here are some more options and solutions that I didn’t take a close enough look at to write about extensively, but that are still worth considering (from what I saw):
For a nice-looking all-in-one solution, check out Adobe Business Catalyst. Like Kajabi, Business Catalyst also boasts design and a polished look as one of the big features, next to all the “inner workings” features. It comes with analytics, an autoresponder, lots of e-commerce features and much more. This is a solution I would have given a thorough test if it weren’t for the fact that I simply don’t want to learn a new CMS (it took me long enough to get WordPress figured out).
Mentioned above, in conjunction with Premium Web Cart, Wishlist Member is a plugin that turns your WordPress site into a very deep and flexible membership site. I’ve been told that it’s one of the best WP membership solutions out there and I’d give it a close look if I were planning to create a few membership sites like that. As it stands, I don’t have too much use for a membership delivery system of this magnitude, at least for the time being.
Of course, I also need to mention Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft eclipses almost anything else in terms of functionality… and in terms of pricing. This platform offers a very cool affiliate management system and an integrated shopping cart. It’s main function is as a highly advanced autoresponder, however. Unlike most autoresponders, Infusionsoft can load up all sorts of automated response sequences, depending on the actions your subscribers take. For example, it can tag subscribers according to what links they click, save all that data in it’s CRM and then allow you to target subscribers very specifically. It’s a very impressive solution, overall. Unfortunately, you need to pay at least $199/month to get all of the essential features, you’ll probably need to hire someone for setup and customization and if you want to run membership sites or protect your download pages, you need a separate solution or you need an outrageously expensive plugin for Infusionsoft.
Recommendations and My Personal Solution
Which platform is the best? That depends a lot on your individual needs.
If you are new to information marketing and aren’t sure about how deeply you want to get involved, I recommend using a third-party affiliate program like ClickBank or PaySpree for one-off products. Except, don’t use ClickBank, because it sucks. Instead, my number one recommendation for an affiliate network goes to DigiResults.
If you want to create a single membership site, then I recommend using Digital Access Pass. DAP is quite affordable and it will grow with your business, should you decide to expand it and start new memberships etc.
If you want a more complete solution with affiliates, coupons, upsells/downsells and all that jazz, then I recommend either FusionHQ, Nanacast or Premium Web Cart. FusionHQ gets my top recommendation, but the other two solutions are definitely worth a look as well and you may find one of them more suitable to your specific needs. Both Nanacast and Premium Web Cart offer free trials, so you can take a risk-free look inside and decide for yourself.
I have personally decided to go with Nanacast as I like the way it integrates with WordPress, the affiliate management module lets me do all of the crazy things I want to do with it, I can have my users create a single login for multiple website (how cool is that?) and much more.
UPDATE:
Pro Tip: When you pick a membership solution for yourself, just settle for good enough. Don’t be an idiot like me and freeze your business for several weeks while fiddling with a dozen possibilities.
Well, at least I got this article to show for it.
Thoughts, questions, comments? Join the discussion in the comments section!
Cheers,
Hi Shane,
thank you for this great overview. This was very helpful.
I personally prefer a best-of-breed approach. Here are my two cents for a membership-site setup. It consists of 4 integrated systems:
1. Joomla(joomla.org: That’s the CMS – free
2. CBsubs (joomlapolis.org): That’s a pretty feature-rich subscription system. Technically t’s a Joomla-Plugin. Nice: API to Post Affiliate Pro. Drip content is missing but it looks like the engineers are already on it. Pricing starts at € 95 onetime; optional: a yearly maintenance fee of € 19.
3. Post Affiliate Pro (www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliatepro). Pricing starts at § 199 onetime.
4. Aweber (http://www.aweber.com). So I’ve heard one the best autoresponders and integrates well with Joomla. Starts $ 19 per monhts.
Any experience with using Joomla as a plattform for marketing-driven membership sites?
Keep it up.
Vanessa
Hello Vanessa,
Thanks for your comment!
I’ve heard that Joomla is a great solution for membership sites. The thing is, it took me long enough to figure out WordPress and that’s why I really don’t want to switch to a different CMS.
So far, I’ve been able to get WP to do everything I want it to do, though. :)
thanks, Shane, for this comprehensive overview! btw, I saw a review of optimizepress, a wp theme that also integrates with nanacast–but it still seems rather complicated to me. Kajabi seems appealing ’cause it looks so easy, tho’ expensive–which means I’d have to be pretty sure I’ve got something that’s really selling first. So I like your suggestion to use clickbank to try out the market–any way to protect your ebook or other product using cb?
thanks a bunch,
Rik
Hi Rik,
Actually, there is some kind of content protection thingy with ClickBank. You can read about it here.
Thats a nice and in depth review of these platforms. I am planning to get a network of some PLR minisites and small niche products. Nanacast seems to be the best choice to handle everything, the only downside is that its a bit expensive. I am looking for a cheaper option as of now until I can afford it.
You might want to consider DAP. It’s a very good product, only costs a one-time fee and it will probably do everything you need it to do. :)
Great reviews Shane.
I’ve spent months delving in the depths of membership software struggling to make things work…and like you I am not a coder.
Shudder!!
I resolved after that to keep things simple and for me that meant wordpress.
probably that means wishlist too although I’ll look at other solutions like PWC which i’ve not heard of previously.
A membership plugin or site can be an ideal way of protecting your products and easily implementing upsells, providing extra bonuses and so on.
There’s no need to set up a “membership” just because you use membership software.
:-)
All The Best
Alex
Exactly. I also use membership sites for my “regular” product delivery. Just nicer than having some download page and nothing more.
You left me speechless. :(
Personally, I’m most interested in Nanacast and Infusionsoft (when I have those 500 customers and a 100k a year-income…)
Technical challenges are (kind of) fun, so I don’t mind using a bit more complex solution.
why speechless?
if you like technical challenges and aren’t overwhelmed by them, I think you’re in a really good position. :)
Why speecheless? I thought I could add some thoughts of my own about this topic… But you pretty much said everything I had in mind.
Well, I can say, that I’ve seen Wishlist Member to be used as a product delivery platform (even for low-ticket items), not necessarily only as a membership site tool.
Also, I’ve heard that Jason Fladlien and Wil Mattos are developing their own membership tool… At least I’m interested about it…
I hadn’t known about the Fladlien/Mattos project (see, you did have something to add!). Could be interesting.
Although Jason is all about “fast” and not at all about “beautiful”, so that might be a problem (for me, at least). If their system is WP based, it could be good. If it’s not, it will probably be functional and ugly. :D
Thank you for the reviews! My current setup for membershipsites is wordpress together with the wishlistmember plugin for the content and clickbank for the payment. I host all files on amazon s3/cloudfront, so there is really no need for kajabi etc. But as you write clickbank really has its limitations if you have a range of products. Maybe nanacast is an answer to this problem, since you mentioned a wordpress plugin.
Nanacast can do pretty much anything you want it to do, in terms of affiliate management. However, the membership plugin is very rudimentary and not at all comparable to something like WhishList. It’s good enough for my purposes, but I think it would seem like a step down from WishList.
WishList fully integrates with PremiumWebCart, though, so that’s worth looking at (PWC has awesome affiliate management).
Hey Shane,
I just wanted to say that I think you did a great job with this review site. Its refreshing to see honest and unbiased reviews.
I just wanted to add my two cents about the Nanacast WordPress Plugin.
1. Nanacast handles the front end sales funnel, subscriber and affiliate management/tracking process. Our affiliate tracking system is among the most accurate and robust in the industry.
2. The Nanacast WordPress Plugin connects that front end subscriber management handled inside Nanacast with the blog. Our plugin is essentially designed to just control the subscriber access to the blog. This less obtrusive approach makes it more compatible with various themes and other content management options inside the blog itself. Also the plugin we provide is opensource so that anyone can hack and improve it.
My own opinion on wordpress blogs as membership content delivery systems is different than most though…
I believe that the best way to use a WordPress Blog is as your front end sales and SEO machine and that to deliver actual membership content is better handled using the Nanacast hosted content delivery system. This is easily done by simply putting a “members login here” link on your blog and pointing it to the login for the Nanacast hosted content which is more flexible even than wordpress posts and pages because it plays nicer with html and javascript than wordpress does out of the box.
Of course you can also just post right in the WP blog for members only and depending on the publishers preferences there is not just one strategy or solution that fits everyone.
Regards,
Josh Anderson
Nanacast CEO
Hi Josh,
Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment!
I have no doubt that Nanacast is a powerful and flexible content delivery platform. My only problem is that I’m simply incapable of making it look good. To be more exact, thanks to a complete lack of coding skills, I’m incapable of changing the standard look and can therefore not match the look of the member’s are to the look of the rest of my sales-funnel. That’s why I like to use WordPress for everything.
An option would be to hire a webdesigner to visually trick out the content pages. So far, the WP plugin is serving me well, though.
It’s helpful to hear how nanacast can integrate with wp, because I’ve had a hard time getting my head around how all this is supposed to fit together.
I can see the advantage of just using wp (or any other website?) as the front-end, with nanacast hosting the rest inside. Does premiumwebcart work the same way? Does it look any better?
do you even need an external website, or can you use pwc for landing pages, content, and sales?
PWC has two membership setups that you can use to deliver content, so you don’t need separate websites for that. For landing pages etc. you do need your own site, though.
Both Premium Web Cart and Nanacast offer trials and my recommendation is that you sign up for those, take a look at the inside of each system, maybe get in touch with support with a few questions, set up a test-funnel and then make a decision based on that.
Great comparision – at least one of them I did not even know (nanacast).
People should keep in mind though that any proprietary hosted solution
a) locks you in with that service
b) leaves you out in the rain when they made enough dough and decide to dump the service
c) puts your data, mailing lists, business ideas and products right into the hands of those who run the service.
Personally I would always prefer a self-hosted solution. And I would keep a safe distance to any hosted solution in the vicinity of certain so-called “gurus” of the IM world…
Thanks for your comment!
I agree that any product by most of the big-name gurus needs to be treated with suspicion. It’s unfortunate, but too many of them have given us strong reasons to doubt them…
Personally, I don’t mind hosted solutions, though. For example, I use a hosted solution for autoresponder- and e-mailing services and I have amazon or YouTube host my videos etc.
Thank you for the helpful info.
I am considering starting a membership site. Membergate seems to be the best (from what I have looked into). I was curious why your review did not cover this product (it seems to be one of the first too).
Thank you,
WRW
Hi,
There must be dozens of membership solutions out there that I did not cover in this article. I simply covered everything I could get my hands on and head around during about two weeks, then I needed to stop the madness and settle for something.
I have literally just completed a pretty large membership site on the Membergate platform. A few things to note:-
- Unless you bring in a designer, you’ll find it difficult to make the site look exactly how you want it (although it is possible)
- The platform is built in Coldfusion and hosted on a Windows server so PHP is out.
- There are a megaton of useful features and a very helpful team of support staff who reply to your questions very quickly
- It is capable of time released content, a number of membership levels and price points
- Surveys, calendars, profiles, discussion forum are all available as part of the standard build.
- Comprehensive affiliate tracking system, although I am using clickbank’s affiliate system. You can secure the download page with Clickbank Secret Key encryption.
- There’s a bit of a learning curve when you first pick it up but the abundance of features makes up for it IMO.
Verdict: I really like it and would certainly recommend it.
The very first thing that strikes me about Membergate is that it’s hugely expensive.
No doubt it’s very powerful, but I’d say you have to have a very clear idea of what you want and need and be sure that MG is the right solution, before dropping that amount of cash on something…
Oh, I forgot to mention, there is one other that looks good: Wild Apricot. Thoughts?
Thank you again.
WRW
Well, they have a cool name.
Looks like they don’t have affiliate management, though, so that’s a pretty big drawback right there…
I thought Membergate was the king-kong – the Google/Microsoft and that all others were just “me too” imitations. Since you have not heard of them, it tells me that there are perhaps hundreds of vendors. The internet’s vastness never ceases to amaze me.
IF you have a chance, maybe you could take a look – but like you said, at some point you have to just stop looking.
Thank you.
WRW
BTW, I found this site. It is a membership site for ….. membership sites (their owners, actually). I have not joined it (yet) it is $27/mo. It also seems to be powered by Membergate.
http://www.membershipsiteowner.com/
Yep, that definitely looks like membergate.
Not to keep going on, but maybe there are differences here that I am missing (being a neophyte). All I am interested in is attracting members to my site that is a niche subject at $9.95/mo. My goal is 1000 subscribers. I am not too interested at this point in any cross selling or affiliate marketing – just posting an article or two per day and hoping the members contribute to the forum.
Are we talking apples and oranges here?
Well, the question is: How are you going to get those 1000 members?
And since they won’t stay members forever, how are you going to keep at that level of members?
You’ll need a heck of a lot of traffic to get that many members and the best/easiest way to get that kind of traffic is by recruiting affiliates.
It’s not the only way to do things, but I certainly wouldn’t want to do without it.
Thank you.
I will need to do further consideration re affiliates.
WRW
Shane, that was a super useful article that you published. Lots of really good comments too!
I know that you can’t be all things to everyone but one area that I wish you would have addressed is the pricing model – i.e. unlimited usage vs a per domain basis. This is a complete game changer for those of us interested in deploying a solution on multiple site.
It seems to me that one huge advantage of going with a solution that can integrate with wordpress is that you can take advantage of all of the incredible plugins associated with it.
People think of wordpress as a blog but it is also a development platform – and a very popular one at that. Many clever and very useful applications are constantly being developed exclusively as wordpress plugins. They are simply not available for ‘normal’ (php or windows asp) websites, other popular open source platforms such as joomla and drupal – let alone proprietary platforms.
Personally, I see this trend only increasing because of the enormous popularity of wordpress.
To me, that’s a huge advantage for choosing a solution that integrates with wordpress – that is rarely discussed in conversations of this sort.
Hi Gregg,
Thanks for your comment!
Of all the solutions mentioned, Kajabi is the only one with limitations on it, even when you get the biggest package.
All of the other options are unlimited or have an unlimited option available.
Hi Shane
Frying my brains at the moment on a more basic level putting all the bits of a new product together so the delivery system review was really useful and timely
I had only really looked at the Clickbank, Payspree and Paydotcom options so far, had a quick look at RAPbank but wasen’t sure on that as there seemed to be too much information missing which worried me
Had watched about half of the first Kajabi Video then lost the will to live and switched it off, talking to a pal of mine last Saturday he said one of them was the better part of an hour OMG!
I think it’s great that you always give a truly objective view, your a model to all of us on how to go forward
Back to the brain frying Thanks Tony
“lost the will to live and switched it off”
That’s priceless. :D
Something like PaySpree or RAPbank can actually be great, especially if you’re only marketing one or two products.
The main reasons I’m so darn picky about my solutions is that I create member’s areas for almost all my products, I am creating entire product lines (and more than one) and I want to offer some extremely cool features for my affiliates.
Hey Shane,
I will be canceling my Kajabi account because right now there is no way to go from a squeeze page to a salesletter page. Right now it is created as a product launch funnel and membership delivery. Everything was quite simple to set in Kajabi. I was able to set up a great membership site with Kajabi in 2hrs. I have been toiling over my Wishlist blog for 3 months. The function of wishlist is simple but creating the design of the blog is not so much. There should be more training from wishlist. The guy from optimize press said that he would be working on creating a theme that could easily create membership sites.
Talk soon, I have to check out my Wishlist site creation responses from Odesk…
Sorry to hear about your troubles, Joshua.
Kajabi seems to be pretty badly broken, unfortunately.
Bloody heck Shane this is a beast of a post!
Kajabi sounded great but with no affiliate management, the constraints with the pricing plan, everything looking “samey” and with what Joshua said above, I’m not going near it.
I’ll let you in the back of my site at membergate – would be interested to get the Swiss Assassin’s thoughts on that!
Personally I love it, but a technophobe wouldn’t – that’s for sure.
Thanks, Paul.
Yeah, I bet you feel right at home in a sea of code, don’t you? :)
Thanks for the great overviews! This is very valuable. Had this been published a year or two ago…I would have saved a ton of time and money (time being the most critical factor).
I finally settled on a product I don’t see mentioned above, called Memberwing-x. After trying some of the products you reviewed, I stumbled across this one and really couldn’t be happier. It does *most* of what you list as necessary. The only thing it doesn’t do well (if at all) is upsells and downsells. I surely could figure out a way to do it.
It would be interesting to get your take on it.
Hi Bill,
Didn’t know about Memberwing-X. I’ll have to take a look at it.
Upsells and downsells aren’t all that important to me personally, either.
Thanks for the review! I’m about to launch my first membership site and need to find a reliable, affordable platform and have started reviewing the systems you covered and then some. I was wondering if you have looked at Rapid Action Profits and the membership plug-in w/ PayPal integration? It seems to meet a lot of your criteria (some of which I haven’t even considered for my site)and you can use it on unlimited sites and it works with wordpress.
I don’t have any experience with the RAP membership module, unfortunately. RAP itself is a very clever system, though.
Hi Shane,
Thanks for the great review. I want to set up a membershipsite before end of the year. I’m thinking about Wishlist. Because of the flexibility of the payment methods.
Just an update on your update :O)
FusionHQ will be opening on November 2nd. You are correct, it does everything that kajabi is “supposed” to do, and a whole lot more. They started developing it way before the kajabi guys “came up with their idea (hmmm)”, which is why fusionhq actually works, and kajabi is ripe with bugs and glitches and was obviously rushed to market ahead of fusionhq (bad plan guys!!). Yeah, there’s plenty of other big reasons not to buy kajabi, but I’m not here to go into all that. If you want reasons to hesitate about kajabi, this guy’s blog will give you more than enough.
http://www.darrenmonroe.com/wordpress/kajabi-non-affiliate-review/
If you want a far superior product (at a much more reasonable price too), then check out fusionhq on November 2nd.
Cheers
MikeD
Very good of you to look into these things!
I am very happy about your choice as well! Nanacast is a very capable system indeed and it is good that it integrates with WordPress sites and other sites as well.
If Josh Anderson’s presentation is still on the Nanacast site, please watch it! It is as good a lesson in marketing as a lesson about the system.
I have also taken a look at Plimus which also seems to be quite good but different. I think Keyword Elite is sold through Plimus.
One thing I keep missing most of the time is the language factor. I would really like to have a Spanish, Japanese etc. versions so people in these countries can deal with system as well.
I think PayPal has a checkout procedure in Spanish.
For those just starting out and needing a very basic system there are some free WordPress based things which solves the initial problems.
I really don’t want to mention them here because I am just about to test them myself and I want to be sure that they are okay before I recommend them.
Best wishes
Thanks for the review, Shane. I decided to go with Premium Web Cart for my membership site because of its features and because of its fantastic customer support.
I’m not sure what you meant by it’s not being a CMS. You can upload all your content (videos, pdf’s), create a somewhat custom look to match up with your main site. What am I missing?
Thanks!
You’re right, you can create pages and membership areas in PWC, I need to rephrase that bit in the article.
What I meant to say is that PWC is not designed to build your front-end (like your online store, for example), but it does have features for the back-end (like membership areas).
Thanks for the notice!
Hello,
Could you tell me about any resource which can help me integrate Premium Web Cart to my existing Joomla site.
Please make it fast its urgent.
Thank you in advance.
Contact PWC support for this. I bet they’ll be glad to help you out.
Thanks so much for your useful advice.
I recently signed up to Kajabi because I wanted something easy to use for setting up a membership site. I certainly didnt want to be sitting day after day working out the technical elements of putting it together. I have a dream I want to make a reality, so I would rather be concentrating on what content im going to be providing, creating JVs and marketing before the launch.
However, after reading your review, I am slightly concerned about how user friendly it is going to be and whether this is actually going to be the right platform?
I tried getting hold of Fusion HQ as this looked like the best alternative. However, this product now appears to be sold out?
What Im really after is something that is easy to put together and will be easy for customers to navigate round. Also, the ability to have a community feel, link a good affiliate program to it and link to other products and services.
Im thinking that it may be best just to outsource the whole putting together of the site, as I would rather be concentrating on my strengths.
Slightly confused, lol…
Any feedback would be extremely appreciated and thank you so much for your help and advice :)
Warm wishes, Amanda
Hi Amanda,
FusionHQ keep shutting the doors and reopening, as I guess they want to make sure the system doesn’t get overloaded with new users (could cause problems and eat up too many resources).
How familiar are you with WordPress?
I create all my product sites with WP and it can be set up with nice, easy navigation, great looking design and comments (= community kind of thing). But it does require a bit of fiddling to get it all to be “just right”. At least it does if you’re as perfectionistic as myself. :)
If you know your way around WP, then Digital Access Pass might be the best option for you. They also recently added a feature for member-only forums, so there’s even more community potential there.
Since you already signed up, you could certainly have a look around Kajabi and see if that would suit your options. I’d just be a bit worried about my data and content on there…
Hope this helps,
Shane
Thank you Shane – this really really helps.
I agree with Kajabi – the data and content issues could be a problem and this really is a long term project, rather than short term… so I see it growing with time. Therefore, my gut tells me it needs to be self hosted.
Im not overly great with WordPress, although I do use it for my blog. However, Im now going to outsource everything re. putting together the site and marketing. Even so, the information you provided is great because I will be able to project manage it easier having this knowledge to hand.
Again, thank you
Warm wishes, Amanda :)
Has anyone checked out Extrememember.com? It looks like a great integrated product but you do have to pay a monthly fee rather then a one time purchase. If it does the job right it may be worth it.
Hi Shane,
Have you made you final decision yet on which solution you are going to use?
Thanks,
Steve
Shane, as someone building a newer membership site product (http://www.Bloomfire.com) that you didn’t review, allow me to add to your thoughts. There is a tendency for consumers to believe that more features = better. That belief has been encouraged by countless marketing dollars. Just take a look at how Apple launches a new OS X. The story is almost always, Welcome to OS X 10.6, with 5 new game-changing features (and 13441 other updates too).
And in some very well-designed products, product managers are able to manage the complexity that comes with each new feature. They’re able to pack more features into the box without making the product clunky or difficult to use. However, some product managers can’t manage the complexity, and the product gets bloated.
If you’re familiar with project management software, you may have heard of Microsoft Project and 37signal’s Basecamp. Microsoft Project packs all the bells and whistles into its product. It’s very powerful. It’s also not very intuitive. On the other hand, Basecamp only keeps the most important bells and whistles. By staying simple, it’s less powerful, but it’s also much more intuitive and user-friendly. 37signals, Basecamp’s creator, cleverly stated that they’re perfectly fine with their users outgrowing their platform and moving to something more powerful, like Microsoft Project. I think that’s smart, Basecamp’s kind of the gateway drug for those new to project management software. And they’ve got millions of customers as a result.
As the Ambassador at Bloomfire, I’ve talked to too many people who have been burned by clunky, complex software. They’d be happy to burn some bells and whistles to buy something that “just works” (as Steve Jobs likes to say in his presentations). For many, they don’t want to invest a lot into their very first membership site. They just want to test the concept with a push-button, low price-point, simple solution. And that’s what our product does. Just insert your logo, add some content, invite your people, and set a price. We take care of the rest.
This comment is a bit too much of an advertisement. You might want to tone that down a little.
Here’s the deal: There’s a place for complex solution and a place for simple solutions.
Simple is not better than complex and neither is complex better than simple. They’re different and suitable for different people.
I, for one, embrace complexity, because I usually have concrete ideas of what I want my system to do and unless it’s a flexible, highly complex system, that exact thing I have in mind is probably not possible. Which is one of the reasons you don’t see my products on ClickBank or any other affiliate network.
On the other hand, if someone just wants a solution that they don’t have to think about and is happy with doing things they way they come, out of the box, then the more complicated systems aren’t the way to go.
Hi Shane,
You mentioned great community features for Kajabi. I’m looking right now at using Kajabi to create a membership site/community. It seems they only allow you to collect some users together into a community and then they are able to comment on content posts that only the admin can create. Users cannot see a list of all users in the community, they cannot privately communicate, they can only follow a user which allows them to click on that user and see what they have posted. They can follow a “group” (topic) created by the admin and see all posts connected to that topic. They cannot create topics. There are no forum, chat or other more social community features. So I’m curious why you felt this limited list of things users can do in Kajabi as great?
Also – do you have any knowledge of a good social group platform? I have looked at grou.ps, ning and a couple others I didn’t remember since they didn’t work for me. I’m still looking for a good choice.
Thanks,
Evelyn
Hi Evelyn,
Thanks for your comment!
I didn’t mean to say that Kajabi was a good platform for a social media type site. The community features in Kajabi are good compared to those in pretty much every other membership platform, because in most cases there are no community features whatsoever. So the fact that Kajabi implements comments and a forum-like feature AT ALL really make it stand out from the rest. Having said that, I still absolutely can’t recommend Kajabi because of it’s many other shortcomings.
As for a system that would be suitable for an actual social network type of site: I really have no idea. I’ve never tested any systems like it and I’m not much of a social media guy myself, so I really can’t make a recommendation. Sorry.
Evelyn check out Profile Manager Premium or Memberkit; both by Interlogy those are very very good on “social”; but very very limited on “membership”; unless your plan is to do a social network membership (or a mastermind site).
Hi Shane; awesome post!
I’ve been keeping my eye on DAP. I saw on DAP site that it works without WordPress on plain HTML sites. Do you know to what extent it can work without WordPress? I do know it can integrate with WordPress but at the same time is WordPress independent because it is unaffected by WordPress upgrades and also what I mentioned that it can work on plain HTML sites.
Nanacast is for me as well the 800 pound gorilla membership solution.
Another solution that I have also been keeping my eye on is the very powerful Delavo. Google it and click on the features and tech specs links. I know that the core of the system is free; but I have no idea how much the plugins costs, neither I know how much the Bronze, Silver and Gold version cost. I will contact them to check that out.
Another alternatves for different budgets are EasyMemberPro, MemberMouse(which I think is a lot better than Wishlist – is very polished)
Didn’t knew of PWC or FusionHQ. That’s good to know.
BTW I am a new follower of imimpact and I am profoundly impressed with your honesty and I’m speechless with the free courses.
Thank you for your kind comment!
Yes, you can use DAP to protect non-WP content and you can use it on it’s own for some very simple product and membership sites (with the emphasis being on VERY simple. I wouldn’t use it like that).
I’ve seen Delavo. From what I’ve heard, the problem is that it’s going to be very expensive, once you’ve loaded it up with some advanced features.
MemberMouse I’d never heard of before. I gotta say that it looks very nice, but it also seems that you NEED to have a Limelight CRM account to use it. Not sure how I feel about that.
Thanks for the great contribution to this discussion!
Thanks Shane for the reply!
I did my homework. Although I have not installed it yet. Yes… Delavo can be extremely expensive.
Don’t have time to read all of this – go ahead to the conclusion. Read my rant at the conclusion.
There still is one very important thing I still don’t know. Each feature is a plugin ( I don’t know which plugins are free and which are paid so for example when I say that Delavo Core integrates with WordPress, or I say it has shipping delivery monitoring I mean it accepts the pluging for those respective features but I don’t know if those plugins are free.
THE VERSIONS
Delavo Core | free
Accepts lots of payment processors, integrates with WordPress, Drupal and major forums, imports/exports data, import users, has a shipping delivery monitoring, brotherhoods(?). The feature comparison chart says that the core account accepts the blog publisher but on the members area that is part of the silver account.
Delavo Bronze | $97/month
The bronze account adds one-time offers, Kunaki integration, banner rotator, brandible PDF, and adds Alertpay as a payment option.
Delavo Silver | $197/month
The silver account adds packages pro (the pro version of the shipping delivery monitoring plugin,
products pro (restrictions, charity commissions, Limit recurring commissions after N installments, master memberships, embedded products)
upsell products, short urls/short urls pro, sponsorships, ban users, customized forms, taxes calculator, questionnaires, jv products (to do a jv deal), broadcast news, labels (to bundle information), links directories, dynamic pricing, custom tags, shopping carts, quick resell (your affiliate gets paid IMMEDIATELY on every single sale, and you get the email address of the buyer.), and adds Paypal WPP DP and Paypal Payflow as new payment options.
Delavo Gold | $497/month
The feature comparison chart says that the gold account adds invoices and the pages (CMS) plugins but on the members area that is part of the silver account.
Gold adds minisites, coupons, special users, promo generator, internal subscriptions, rewards, affiliate downline, affiliate series (to reward affiliates), export data, mass user operation, testimonials (facilitates members to provide a testimonial), certification manager (certification tags on members), delavo to delavo integration module, plugin follow-up manager, geo tracking, clouds (weird name for suggestions), multiply records, reminders, support tickets, one page order form integratable in any HTML page, database backup, lesson manager, content series (drip feed system), and privileges.
CONCLUSION
The free Core version is OK if you don’t care about affiliates, drip feed system, or OTO or upsells.
The bronze version may look good for selling physical products; especially with it’s Kunaki integration (although without shopping cart!); but has no sense paying $99/month without drip feed system, affiliate manager, upsells, oh my without database backup or without being able to ban users. Neither it accept Paypal WPP DP or Paypal Payflow.
The silver account is full of features and have shopping carts and upsells but paying $197/mo without drip feed system, affiliate manager, coupons, still no database backup, no Delavo to Delavo integration, no privileges setup.
¡It’s nonsense to have to pay the absurd recurring amount of (drumroll) $497/month to be able to drip feed system, have an affiliate manager, a database backup, privileges!
I have still to clarify again that all the features are plugins and I don’t know which plugins are free and which are paid.
The features are definitely poorly distributed.
Thanks for that!
Yeah, I agree that the pricing makes no sense this way. By the time you want the gold features (which you probably will, sooner or later), you’ll be paying far too much and there are other systems that offer very similar feature sets at far lower prices…
Just goes to show that it’s a minefield out there. There are so many solutions for shopping carts and membership sites, if I wanted to include them all, this post would be a mile long… I’m actually thinking of maybe creating a separate site, just for reviews of these systems. If I find the time, I might do that.
Hi Shane,
I just wanted to pop back by and mention some updates about Nanacast’s integrations for WordPress.
Our main philosophy with our MemberLock wordpress plugin for Nanacast is that we created it to be very light weight in order to play nice with other plugins and themes. Also we made our plugin open source… it was released to inspire others to hack it and build upon it.
1. For example it works great with Optimize Press which is a nice direct response style theme and which also provides great page templates.
2. Here is another great example of what one of our users has done with our Nanacast MemberLock wordpress plugin:
http://www.steveovens.com/internet-business/how-to-link-nanacast-com-and-wishlist-member
He hacked it into a Nanacast + Wishlist wordpress plugin to integrate Nanacast + Wishlist + WordPress. So now you can have a Nanacast sales, affiliate, and subscriber automated membership blog combined with the content management features of Wislist if you are a licensed Wishlist user.
3. I also wanted to mention that currently we are working on an update that will improve the content delivery integration from Nanacast to our MemberLock wordpress membership plugin so that those who happen to use wordpress with Nanacast can take advantage of increased wordpress integration with Nanacast’s powerful time dripped content, group and individual real time “broadcasted” content, and personalization features found in our content delivery system. This only effects how dripped content is displayed inside of the blog..
There are lots of other features coming out this year as well but those I mentioned above seemed to be the most related to the discussion here on your blog.
Regards,
Josh Anderson
Hi Shane
What is your opinion on OptimizePress?
Have you seen it or tried it?
It’s being raved about in several blogs and only has a one off fee which is attractive, but would rather hear a totally honest opinion about it – as you do
Thanks
Steve
Hi Steven,
I currently use it for most of my sales-pages. But I’m not entirely happy with it. In many ways, it’s quite clumsy and it has a weird habit of screwing up code even more than WordPress already does on it’s own. However, either that or DigiLaunchPad are the best currently available options, IMO.
In other words: It’s not perfect, but it’s still the best solution out there. :)
So did you mean DidiLaunchPad or OP is the best solution?
OP seems confusing as all the options in it’s own setup area PLUS it seems to duplicate the settings in the New Page setup everytime. (and so so many to think about & can’t see them visually whilst choosing/setting up)
And whats with the Loss of all use of wordpress regarding Posts and Zero site design etc
I like the pages and layouts etc but I don’t know if it’s worth all the disruption to my wordpress install and posts and whether i really want to mess about with sub domains and 2nd installs of OP+WP and redirecting one blog to another to get the pages that OP makes AND get my site design!
You could copy the shortcodes and some images and apply them to any other WP setup with stylesheet setups!!
Oh, you definitely want to use separate installs of WP for your sales- and squeeze-pages, no matter which theme you choose.
OP does have a blog compontent, though. Still, I highly recommend keeping your sales-stuff separate from your blog-stuff.
but what about say my blog with a homepage being a squeezepage?
i would have to re-direct my main domain to a sub domain (with OP on it) then on the sub-domain suppose i would have to hand make links back to the rest of the blog website?
how does all this switching between main domain and sub-domain impact on SEO? Any loss of rankings as it would be split up between sub-domain and domain ?
thanks
Steve
(could you give a scenario how you use it please – could always email to me if need be)
Hey Shane thanks for the great review article!!!
I just abandoned DAP – after a couple of months of messing around with it – couldn’t manage on my own and had a hard time finding someone to work on it. Great people – and good product if you can manage the details.
I’m now in Nanacast – appreciate Josh’s comments – it is a great product.
Have you tried Get Profits theme? And do you know if it will integrate with Nanacast – and maybe be a little better on code than Optimize Press?
thanks!
:) Cary
I have to say I’m surprised you find Nanacast easier to handle than DAP! I personally found the Nanacast interface took much more getting used to than DAP, but perhaps it’s down to personal preference.
The Profits Theme offers great value for the price. I’ve only just started testing it, though.
Does anyone have any experience of Rapid Action Profits membership site management system? I am setting up a series of membership sites and amemberpro seemed to fit most of the boxes – however I really appreciate the comments about integration mentioned above which have caused me to eliminate it. I just cant be doing with stuff thats so difficult to use. Rapid Action Profits has been recommended to me as being feature rich and easy to use.
Shane,
Are you familiar with WP Member Champ by Jason Fladlien? It seems a bit overpriced for the limited feature set, but on some level that simplicity is appealing as well.
I am also considering DAP, but am concerned about the learning curve. Looking at some of the tutorials on their site doesn’t inspire confidence that it will be easy to set up.
Your thoughts are appreciated.
Hi Bruce,
I haven’t used Member Champ myself, but I’m familiar with it.
Speed and simplicity are what it’s all about. If you mainly want to be able to set up a membership site very, very quickly and without having to deal with a learning process, then it’s for you. It is very limited in what it can do, though.
For me personally, it’s definitely not the right choice, because I’d much rather invest time to learn how to use a more complex solution than settle for less. But that’s just me and my perfectionism. :)
I tend to agree with you philosophically. I really like the features of DAP, but am concerned about it becoming a time drain to get it up and running.
I may need to reach out to the developers to get more comfortable with the available resources and support.
Thanks for your input.
Why do you keep your sales pages and squeeze pages separate?
So theoretically for 1 site you could have a WP install for the sales page, another for the squeeze page(s) (if it was not a launch sequence as in Optimizepress) and another for your product access?
Are you still with Nanacast?
Have they made any improvements to their checkout process?
Hi Andrew,
I just keep my “customer” and “non-customer” pages separate. I.e. the sales- and squeeze-pages are on one WP install and the member’s area/download section is on another, either in a subfolder or on a sub-domain.
You could use OptimizePress with the built-in member’s area of course, but I simply don’t like their design and layout.
I’m not using Nanacast anymore. Currently, I’m using Post Affiliate Pro for the affiliate stuff and DAP for the products.
So you use PAP4 for the affilate stuff.
Do you find affiliates get confused about the DAP affilate links? I found the DAP affiliate system very underwhelming.
Hi Andrew,
You can “hide” the DAP affiliate information, so that your members don’t even ever see it. This should avoid any confusion. It is very basic, but good enough to start out with. Depends on what you want from you affiliate system. It’s not more basic than, say, ClickBank.
Thank you Shane for that comprehensive report or decision process. The comments certainly show once again that no one person is possession of all of the facts. Like many people too much information can stall any progress. So while I have a lot of WP information and software – I haven’t made that start.
I must say I’m attracted to FusionHQ as they been revising the interface and giving the user the choice of either having a tick the boxes or/and drag the elements around the page. It has a vast array of templates while still being able to make your own designs. It certainly has a lot of features for the money.
Hey Steve
I am currently in the middle of this process. Man is it painful with all these options. At the moment it is a toss up between Nanacast and PWC. Which way did you end up going after the update where you said you might leave Nanacast?
I’m also looking at Drupal Ubercart. I like the self hosted idea a bit better than leaving everything in the hands of someone else’s server. What do you think with regards to that? It would be a lot more work to get going but maybe worth it in the long run. Note that this is to sell software products with or without recurring subscriptions.
Hope you can help me out a bit here because this is driving me insane!
Cheer
James
I actually ended up using Digital Access Pass in combination with Post Affiliate Pro. It’s still not the ideal solution and it required some custom programming, but it works for my purposes.
Cheers Shane (sorry for calling you Steve). My mind was probably in tatters after staring at different options for hours on end.
I actually noticed your post where you said you switched to DAP and PAP. I’m thinking PAP is the way to go as well – it does a bit more than I thought it did with coupons etc.
Nothing really is the ideal solution, which makes the decision so hard.
Thanks for the help
Oh one more thing, how did you go moving all of your affiliates from Nanacast to PAP?
You can’t really move them. I just mailed all of them and invited them to log into the new account and get their new links.
Hi Shane:
Wow…..I’ve spent the last week or so looking around at reviews and getting ready to try a few “free trials” of different tools. I just got back from a conference where a few of the products you mention had booths etc.
I’ve read maybe 50-100 different reviews online so far, and yours by far was the most comprehensive and unbiased…..pointing out that there is NO “one perfect solution” is huge. I got tired of reading reviews by people who were either 1) obviously commissioned salespeople or affiliates for the product they just happened to say was perfect and all other products are crap, or 2) reviews by people who haven’t even used the products or researched them, or 3) reviews by people who are wayyyyyyy more into programming (nothing against them….it’s just not me).
I hadn’t read as much info about DAP or Fusion before your review. Also I just met Andy from Kajabi. Thought they offer some interesting benefits, it just didn’t seem like a good fit. After studying infusionsoft for a while, I have a whole new respect for how much they can do….in fact, I can honestly say I don’t think any one product even comes close to them. This also led to the reason they aren’t the best choice for me. “THEY” can do unbelievable things with the system…..I’m not “THEY”, and the learning curve for infusionsoft is just too big for the amount of time I can spend on it.
I had narrowed down my list and was looking at nanacast and a few others as I am looking for something that is more middle of the road between features and ease of use (yes nanacast can offer lots of features, but seems a heck of a lot easier that infusionsoft). I think I will add DAP and Fusion HQ to the list now and try a few out. I hope to get things rolling this month with membership features etc.
Thanks again for a great source for information!!
-Jeff
Hi Shane,
Thanks for the in-depth review – it’s a belter! I’m surprised I didn’t find it earlier as I’m been googling this stuff to death over the last couple of weeks. Anyway, I’m glad I’ve finally found it and read it.
Did you have a good look at ProfitsTheme at any point? It looks like it’s very similar to OptimizePress – possibly more functionality but not as nice on the eye. The membership area of PT looks eye-catching but I’ve got to say the rest of looks pretty ugly (blog, sales pages) out of the box. Like yourself, I’m a bit of a control freak, so the look of the site and membership area is very important to me.
It’s interesting what you say about keeping your free/paid stuff separate using different installs. Noted.
I’m currently mulling over either of ProfitsTheme or OptimizePress in conjunction with DAP. However, after reading your article I’m now thinking that I could use pretty much any theme. Is that the case? Does DAP help you to set up a nice looking membership area on its own without the need for a theme like OP or PT?
Thanks,
Neil
P.S. As an aside, you should watch Barry Schwartz’s brilliant TED talk “The Paradox of Choice”. It sums up perfectly why we’re all so unhappy trying to find the perfect membership site solution :)
I had a brief look at Profts Theme. I think it’s a good solution, concerning the price. It’s not what I’m personally looking for, though.
With DAP, you can use any theme, that’s correct. That’s one of the things I like about it, as it allows me to style my membership/download areas in any way I want. It doesn’t come with a theme of it’s own, though.
Great reviews Shane. Thank You for that . I have tested and worked with several Membership system and know the enormous amount of times it takes to test them fully before making a decision to buy one.
From my personal experience, I tested as well many but will mention only 2 here. I built 2 sites on Membergate (clients insisted on using it) which I think is overpriced and really not easy to customize the way you want just to cite just a few cons.
I bought Wishlist Member a while back ago but stopped using it because of a flaw I discovered during my multiple registration testing processes. I could basically bypass the paypal payment and get a user/pass and be able to access all the membership content. I will not post how here for obvious reason. Their answers at that time was “we know and are working on it”. About a month and 1/2 later I asked when this will be resolved, they said they were still working on it. Maybe they fixed this flaw now but cannot test this again because I don’t have Wishlist Member anymore. Anyway at that time I had to take a decision so I decided to go with a different Membership system. Too bad because from all the Membership sites I tested back then I really liked Wishlist Member.
The one I have been looking at more recently is DAP. I also like DAP for his “content protection”.
Why didn’t I see this before?
(Slaps myself.. for forgetting to check IMImpact)
Anyways.. one you might consider for an update.. Traindom.com
Fairly easy to use.. and very “All in one”.. as you can imagine it has it’s limitations.. but definitely useful for getting up a Minimum Viable Product up
Thanks for the tip!
This post could use an update, I think. I’ll put it on my to-do list…
No worries!
I realize how old it was.. but most of your posts are pretty evergreen.
Hello Shane,
thanks for the tips. Really Great! I m interested in your final Decicion. Why Digital Access Pass in combination with Post Affiliate Pro?
I have started a selfhelp community for fat people with my own method without dieting i have developed in the last years: welowa.org In Collaboration with coders based on Drupal Commons (great tool but very hard work for non coder). Now I m building with wordpress for the .com and different the commercial sites around it. Big thing i know to mmuch for one ;)
I m new to wordpress and have checked most of the members sites. If the welow.org remains in Drupal, it must be, im afraid than i need a solution where users can register at WordPress DAP and their registration is send to welowa.org. Drupal is in the future of DAP, only Post Affiliate Pro has a WordPress plugin and Drupal Modul. And there is a german translation module to, which seems fine. So i think i have no choice, i have to go your way DAP and PAP.
Was it difficult to install DAP and connect with PAP? As I understood you are – like me – not a coder, you dont like to swim in a sea of code? Could and Can you administer yourself the Wordpres+DAP combination?
If you have an PAP affiliatelink, pls post it. Its would be a pleasure for me to use it. (If you read this ASAP pls send me the DAP link too.
Thanks in advance.
wolfgang
Hi,
I’ve sent you an email reply. This post is about to be updated with some new information.
Hi Shane, thanks for taking the time to review Kajabi.
Have you had a chance to personally use it recently? The software has evolved a great deal since the launch, and it’s actually very flexible in what it can do in handling your online sales process and private membership/download area. If you’d like to give it another go, just let me know and I’ll hook you up with a free trial.
Also, the information you have above is wrong. Kajabi provides a way for you to export all your data at any time and doesn’t hold any of it hostage.
Thanks again, Shane! We hope you’ll give Kajabi another shot.
Steve
Shane,
Your post is very helpful. Have you looked at Market Pro Max? I’m trying to decide between Kajabi, Market Pro Max and Fusion HQ. I belong to several programs that are hosted on the Kajabi platform. I particularly like their commenting, question & answer features.