Works great! Some very minor quirks.

We have been using Paid MemberShips Pro (PMP) for over a year now (just auto-renewed).

A year ago we researched a lot before committing to PMP – after all, you want to avoid to have to re-do the same elaborate setup with another software piece again, for our not-for-profit online community.

The setup was straightforward – obviously it takes more than 5 minutes to set up membership levels and define all the rules you want to display, and so forth. It was sure reasonable, and after three days we had it all running, including setting up the partner(s) on the processing end (outside the site and PMP).

Summary: runs great and has been very reliable. We are happy with the product and the service, it ties in well with Stripe for credit cards (that integration was a breeze).

There are some quirks, but in the overall picture those are not that important, and not big enough to substract a star for the 5-point rating (PMP asked for an honest rating):

– we had trouble setting up PayPal in any form; but that is a PayPal problem (p-i-t-a, frankly). We had experienced a rocky relationship with PayPal use and reliability before; so we were not very surprised at that. If the PayPal options for integration would be dropped from PMP, it would save users a lot of frustration; for competitive reasons, this is likely no option for PMP (which is not at fault here, it is entirely PayPal).

– even with the support (very prompt! and detailed) from PMP we were not successful in setting up gift memberships (have one member pay for another members’ paid plan). That requires going down to the code, and went well beyond our abilities — and we sure did not want to ‘rock the boat’ and risk breaking the system, which processes a bunch of payments daily.

– updating credit cards does not work through PMP for the member. We solved it by having the member cancel his plan and subscribe to it again, just with a different card. With thousands of payments, this has happened very rarely, so neglibible for us.

– HTML code shows in the titles of the membership plans. This is a tad annoying and does not make us look very professional. We set up a good dozen membership options for our members, different types, and for each the option to do it monthly, half-yearly, or yearly. To make this list with all the terms and conditions easier to read, we highlight the important bits with the “strong” HTML tag. While that works in the options list (does what we want) in all subsequent communications (email confirmations, etc) the code shows. If an upgrade at some point fixes that, we would welcome it very much.

As you can see, these are no huge issues, merely quirks. The main part works: giving members the option to pick a plan for their donations, collecting through with Stripe, with a minimum of privacy loss (via Stripe), and the least overhead for us volunteer administrators.

Wordpress plug-ins can be a huge pain, and resolving conflicts between them, and betweem them and WordPress has cost us some grey hairs over 8 years, since we run this community. When it is features and things like that, it is annoying — but when it is about the money, it is a HUGE issue. And because it is, it should be mentioned that PMP has been running very reliably, we have not encountered any technical problems, conflicts, and such at all. As the saying goes, “when it comes down to cash, the fun stops” … and PMP has kept the fun going. This is sure a plugin choice as critical as WordPress itself, or Wordfence to keep the bad guys away. PMP has lived up to the (high) expectations, kudos for that, too.

We are looking forward to a lasting relationship with PMP 🙂

• This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Scaffies.
• This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Yui.