WP Wishlist Member Review

This is a review of using WP Wishlist Member for building membership websites.

First, do not take my word for it.  When I decided to buy Wishlist Member, I spent more than an hour watching the videos on their website.  They do one of the best jobs I have ever seen at showing you what their product does.  I Yes, WP Wishlist Member has a 30 day money back guarantee, but I doubt anyone ever uses it because it is an excellent product and because they do such a good job of educating a prospective buyer in advance of the purchase.

Now for the wordpress membership plugin itself, it is important for me to give you some history of what I am comparing it to.

I started my first membership site initially in Moodle.  Moodle is a nice open source eLearning tool that is used by entrepreneurs and big universities alike.  However, I soon became overwhelmed with trying to customize it and deactive what was way too many features.  I was spending too much time with the software and not making money.

So then I tried Ning.  Ning is a nice free community site and I paid a small amount to take the adwords off of the site.  Ning has a great community feel but I was not developing a real asset (developing the domain) and I could not easily structure and host course oriented information in a friendly way.

Then I tried Drupal.  Drupal is another open source community and publishing platform and I do think Drupal could have worked well, but I was forced to start learning a new technology, which I did not want to invest more time into.

Then I tried Litmos.  I really liked the simplicity of Litmos but I found it very expensive as I would be paying per person per month – and it would add a much higher cost to the opperation of the membership site and would hurt the profitability.

Sadly, it took me a full six months to realize that the best membership site software would be to use what I was already comfortable with – WordPress.  I began using the free membership site wordpress plugin but I had to manually add and remove people from the site.

Finally I found WP Wishlist Member and everything got easy.  I can now launch the technology around a membership site in less than an hour and focus on the important things, like content and marketing the membership site.

WP Wishlist Member is one of the best software investments I have ever made.  I integrate it with 1ShoppingCart and the entire thing runs so smoothly that I tend to thing of the membership site as free money.