Online Membership Software – Why aMember

When it comes to online membership software, unlike a few short years ago, you now have no shortage of options. Yet, at the time of writing, I still fall back on aMember. aMember is one of the earliest online membership software. That by itself scores many points in my books. Software come and go and scripts have an even higher ‘turnover’ so to speak because many scripts are coded as pet projects. For a script to be able to last that long and still actively developed and improved, that tells me they’ll be around for a little while.

Why is that important? Other than the obvious reasons e.g. trust, running membership sites are a little differernt too because we expect to earn revenue from them month after month for years to come. If you cannot get support for your membership system, you’ll have very unhappy members. Also, after so many years of selling this software, the developers are experienced with the unique challenges of running online membership sites.

My first encounter with aMember was when Alice & Kelly invited me to setup Mom Masterminds with them. It’s been a while now but I’m still a little amazed how well thought out this software is. For example, a member paid you for a full month today and next week they unsubscribe but never ask for a refund, aMember would continue allowing this person access to the membership area until the end of the month. Now at first you might that is bad programming. What logic is there in it? But if you delve deeper. aMember is correct. Because this person paid you for a month and didn’t get refunded, they should rightfully get access for a full month.

I find that a great automation tool because more often than not, I come across sites that will cancel my access immediately even though I still have 1/2 a month left. So me, the customer is responsible to do the work of the seller. Not sure about your customers but if I’m one of them, it’ll leave a bad taste in my mouth.

The more I work with this online membership software, the more I love the flexibility of it. So what do I mean by flexible?

Flexible content management. aMember works with existing web pages. You don’t even need to move the web pages into a special folder although it would be easier if you did. This is great because it means less reworking of your site.

It works with plain old HTML sites too. Doesn’t matter if you built them with FrontPage, XSitePro or hand code. And finally if you prefer a more complete membership looking site, you can get a plugin to work with your favorite content management system. aMember has some of the largest number of plugins for all the popular content management systems.

Flexible payment processing options. This is and continues to be one of the big reasons why I choose aMember. Too many systems work with only PayPal. This one has a lot of different payment systems you can use. The nice thing is, if you’re outside of the U.S., the script can work with a bunch of International payment processor services like Beanstream, Protx, WorldPay and Verotel.

Custom programming at very reasonable prices. If you ever need to customize aMember in any way, Alex the programmer is very reasonable and he does a good job since he knows it inside out.

Built in affiliate program. When we first got started, this was not available, forcing us to use an external software which turned out to be a big problem. Now the affiliate program is built in, managing affiliates becomes a whole lot easier especially when you pay recurring commissions.

The Downs

User interface isn’t exactly pretty. To some people it may look awfully 90’s and unsexy. But it’s highly customizable and as far as the back office goes, as long as the software does a great job, looks don’t mean much.

Once in a while hiccups happen when there’s a disconnect between the script and the payment processor, but that can happen with any online membership software – hardly a fault of the script itself. I’ve also found them infrequent.

Reporting is very basic. If you want to do complex sales analysis, forget it. Even some basic reporting stuff e.g. you want to find out how much sales tax was collected last year, that’s not available. Another irritating thing about the reporting is, it’ll report the total lump sum of all the payments made by the customer to date, not broken down by month. Definitely lots of room for improvement in the reporting.

Affiliate program is still very basic. You can’t manually assign a sale to an affiliate. They’ve only added the affiliate program not too long ago so I think they’re still pretty green as far as this goes but have no doubt it will be improved over time.

The Bottom Line

Overall, I’m willing to sacrifice a little reporting (you can work your way around this) and small affiliate issues for superb a online membership software that just works.

If you’re looking to setup your own membership site and don’t want to mess with the technical stuff, they’ll even throw in the installation for free. Good deal. Take aMember for a test run, visit their site and click on the Online Demo.