Three years ago, I did a video overview of the Membership extension for WooCommerce. A lot has transpired over those 3 years, including as a substantial increase in the growth of membership sites.
So why use this extension when there are so many options out there? One simple reason. If you want to extend your WooCommerce store to include memberships, well, this extension integrates seamlessly with Woo. In fact, it’s built just for Woo.
There is a lot of opportunity for online shops to bring memberships into the mix, depending on what you sell. Building up that loyal customer base while creating recurring revenue for yourself is a perfect mix.
The WooCommerce Memberships Extension
If you are looking to create subscriptions for your members, the Subscriptions extension is perfect for the job and will be part of what I show you in this overview.
Creating a Membership for a Product
To use as an example, although this isn’t a physical product, I have a podcasting mastermind subscription on my site. And I want to turn it into a monthly membership.
I will find options to set that up. First, I need to create a new membership plan and then return to select it.
General Settings
Here is where I will start with setting access and membership length. Since I have a subscription already set up for this product, so I am choosing to go monthly and adding that product.
Restrict Content
Next I can restrict any content that may be part of the membership. For example, with this mastermind I might have several pages for resources and other information available to only my members. I can restrict those here.
Restrict Products
I can do the same for products. Maybe I have other services or resources such as a video series that I want to restrict only for member consumption. Or perhaps I have a great deal on a microphone that I want to make available only available to members.
This is one of the benefits of this extension, the ability to restrict your WooCommerce store products seamlessly.
Purchasing Discounts
If you have products that you want to still sell on your site but offer your members a discount, you can set those here. Again, you get the added benefit of seamless integration with WooCommerce.
Members Area
Here you can control what content will appear about the membership in the members/customer account page. Depending on what you are offering, this gives a great central spot where they are able to easily access their membership offerings.
Email Content
You can activate several emails directly tied into memberships. Once you have done that in the WooCommerce email settings, you are able to customize the content of each one of the emails you have activated.
Assigning the Membership to a Product
When you are viewing a product, you can start to create your membership on that product page and then finish your membership plan later. Or as I have done, I have the plan already created and will assign it to the product.
You will see the options you have here on your product page.
The first option is to make this product forced to be public no matter any of the restriction rules. If not toggled, you can set the product as totally restricted.
If I toggle the first option on, all other fields disappear.
Next I have added the member plan I previously had set up.
And lastly, you can add discounts. But similar to the content restriction, you can toggle it on to exclude the product from any member discounts of any plan you might offer.
Membership Settings
The basic settings for the membership extension will be found in your WooCommerce > Settings. In the General options, you can set the global content restriction mode. As you can see, if I choose the Hide content only, that displays the excerpt and allows me to show a teaser.
Besides hiding it completely, you can have it redirect to a page, which could be the sales page on the membership side of your site or store.
And when members log in, you can control whether to send them to a specific page or not.
As far as products go, you can toggle some options on or off for these specific global settings around discounts, cumulative purchase, exclusion of products from any member discount and hiding restricted products on the shop page.
And for the restricted content, you can create a custom message based on the kind of restrict and also for discounts that will appear for non-members when landing on that page, post or product. Each option of course has its own distinct messages.
Settings on Posts and Pages
For any of your content, you can add the content restrictions just as easily when you are on the post or page.
And you can also customize the message non-members will get if you have chosen to show it.
Free Shipping for Members
You can also add a free shipping option only for your members that will be available only if they have an active membership.
What Members and Non-Members Will See on Your Shop
Once someone has signed up and visits their account page, under the membership tab, they will see all the content they can access.
Also, they can view any of the discounts you are offering them as a member.
And if a non-member was to land on one of the restricted pages, and I had it set to show the custom excerpt, this is what they would see.
Hopefully, this shows you how easy it is to integrate your WooCommerce store into a membership site, or even a part of the membership site. The sky is the limit. You can do simple or as complex as you want with both new and existing content and products. You can learn more about what the WooCommerce Membership extension can do, plus a lot of great resources to help you extend it here.