Should you really buy S2 Member? Worth it?

I remember when I was reviewing all of the different WordPress Membership plugins. I remember spending hours upon hours of trolling through the various forums of the different membership plugin providers, wordpress.org and all the other reputable wordpress community blogs, forums, etc. I literally spent well over 20 hours doing my research to determine which membership plugin was the best solution for my needs.

Here are some of the things I needed:

• Afforadable Solution
• Content Dripping
• Multiple Membership Levels
• Paypal Integration
• Authorize.net Integration
• Clean code!!!!!!
• Quick Responding Forum Support Agents
• Customizable member capabilities

Those are just some of the things that I needed in my wordpress membership plugin solution. I had a very huge project that I needed to complete, plus several other projects in mind that would all require some sort of membership plugin.

I found quite a few worthy solutions. I researched all of them. I definitely did not make a quick decision (I spent a month doing my research before making my choice). I will honestly say that some of the User Interfaces of the other membership plugins seemed to be a little more user-friendly, but then came the forums.

I’ve always felt that in order to find the real quality of a theme or plugin is to read the support forums. That’s where you see what kind of troubles people are having and just how good the customer service really is.

Some solutions required a trial period to get access to the forum. Some made their forums visible to public. Some I had to use logins for friends (yeah…I know…a little underhanded, but I have to do my research damn it).

In the end, I found that while the S2 Member User Interface was a little lacking in the “looks” department, it turned out the be the most organize, dynamic and complete UI. While I can go into a plugin and hack it to suit my needs, I have yet to need to do that with S2 Member. I know have S2 Member running on 4 websites and have yet to need to make a single php hack. Every modification I’ve needed to make was made through the S2 Members dashboard.

So far there has only been one thing that I was not happy with in regards to S2 Member, but as it turns out, it’s a WP Core function that I need to write a plugin for to get the desired result. So I can’t blame S2 Member for that.

Right now, you’re probably thinking, why is this guy putting his review here? Why not take this exact same review and post it to a blog and earn some affiliate cash with it? I could do that, but the chances of YOU finding my blog when doing your research is slim. Plus, I don’t want someone to read this and think “what if he’s just saying all this to get affiliate earnings?”

Posting this here instead of on one of my blogs or review sites will help more people see the benefits of S2 Member, which gives me an opportunity to thank S2 Member for their dedicated product support and dedicated customer support.

Thank you S2 Member.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by  VegasKev.

Hello Kevin,

I agree with you on the research part, at this point I enjoy doing research for everything I download or buy. :P

I’ll send this review to Cristián, Jason and Raam, so that they can give you their thanks. ;)

@Eduan:

Thanks for forwarding the thread. Research is more important than people think. People usually buy plugins like this as a solution, and often times their solution requires special needs and they don’t realize that a “solution” can become another a problem if they don’t execute proper research before buying.

I totally see your point Kevin, it’s always best to research and compare thoroughly, and then buy.

Otherwise most of the time it will not work the way you expected it to, or it simply will be a total waste of money, if you payed for it.

So, with time I’ve come to enjoy researching, since I need to do a lot of it, and I also enjoy learning new stuff. :)

Wow, Kevin, thanks so much for the kudos! It’s so nice of you to take the time to write this. You made my day. :)

I’m very happy that you’re satisfied with the support and the plugin. We’ll keep trying our best!

By the way, if you have suggestions to improve the UI in some way, please don’t hesitate to tell us. Jason and I will soon move to the UI phase of the new s2Member and any feedback we get will help improve what we have now.

And Eduán, thanks so much for the heads up!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by  Cristián Lávaque.

To clarify….

I don’t think you necessarily need to redesign the UI. At first glance your UI seemed to be very non-appealing compared to at least one of your competitors, however once I dove in, I realized that your UI is actually very well organized and efficient. If you plan to make changes, maybe just add Example Images and Vid Tuts directly in the different settings. I will say this much….when I setup my first S2 Member site options, it took about 4 or 5 hours, though my second one only took about 1.

I’ve only done a few and I have all of the basic settings and configurations memorized…..my point is that it is better than it first appears….in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback. :)

Actually, we are planning to eventually have short vid tuts next to each thing in the admin area for the new s2Member. And we may also include wizards at some point.

when I setup my first S2 Member site options, it took about 4 or 5 hours, though my second one only took about 1.

I know well what you mean, same thing happened to me when I started using it.