About: Michael Kang

@Julian,

It’s nice to see a response here. Before I write this response I’d like to remind everyone that we are fully paid customers of S2Member Pro and have been in support of the continued development of this product since we bought it 6 months ago.

No, we have not solved the problem with downloads redirecting to the front page, as our team is not made up of engineers but rather teachers and writers. It happens every time, and I’ve only found it works correctly on IE (which I hate using) on only one of our office computers (not the others). Also our multimedia (MP3 files) do not stream 100% of the time from AWS; it’s more like 50%, which is dismal. Meantime, we have opened a separate bucket on AWS and set our files public and then put the download links into emails and sent them off to clients. I wish we could spend more time on our specialtise of teaching and writing than on technical issues, but our client’s experience on our site is of paramount importance.

So although clients are satisfied, the problem remains: the user experience on our site is flawed and is nothing that they want to rave or share about with their friends. We have over 50,000 fans across 3 FB pages, so the user experience, interactivity, and fun is very important for word of mouth marketing. S2M may not realize that out of the 678 fans I see on their page, most of us are business owners who then showcase their (S2M) product to hundreds of thousands or millions of other consumers on the internet. When they have a less-than-acceptable user experience or otherwise experience a loss of money and not get what they pay for, it not only reflects on our brands, our companies’ reputations, our services, but it also reflects negatively on S2Member, and in my opinion this is enough to get lawyers involved. There’s a discrepancy between the advertisement of the product, the user agreement, and what the client actually receives. However in his defense, if S2Member instead charged 1% for every product sold through all its clients, he’d be able to afford the time and workforce to address all these issues, we alone would be contributing many thousands to his income per year. We’re a small but growing team, but we don’t see the necessity for hiring tech people full time in our line of business when most of the solutions we need already exist, and it’s part of our competitive advantage in our market.

So we come to the point of alternate solutions: we have been testing and implementing Woocommerce, for which I see several benefits:

1. They have a team of several dozen people working on it. So it’s not a single guy in his free time (and maybe a couple helpful fans) trying to fix a product who doesn’t make enough money off of to start a real business operation (I don’t know anybody who actually does that though). But I prefer a team of people who can complete user experience testing in all areas, not just trying to add lots of bells and whistles. Basically, S2M is selling a cheap product out-of-the-box with laissez-faire attitude and no liability to the user experience as described in the user agreement. In fact, he’s not even invested in the experience or our results in doing business or he’d change his business model. And if he was concerned with user experience, he wouldn’t place a notice above this box I’m typing in that says “Support Reps are NOT present here, for company support…” That’s just an excuse and it reflects on how out-of-touch he is with his clients. ALL feedback should be addressed and taken into consideration, no matter where it’s written: FB, Twitter, the “wrong” forum, wherever.

2. Woocommerce is open-source coding platform, so it comes with educational training plugins, like Sensei, which would be great for our business model. And many many other plugins, like memberships, Amazon store, a myriad of business solutions, integration with SalesForce, integration with WPML for multilingual sites like ours… These plugins come at a price, but I believe you need to invest in your own professionalism if you expect your clients to trust your brand, products, and services. I asked S2M earlier this year about integration with WPML and the response was basically have WPML contact me if they want it, which I view as some sort of superiority complex, rather than a helpful-let’s-all-work-together attitude and build the next best thing. Personally, I was asking myself why am I now obligated to do this? Although I have an invested interest, the attitude alone told me that he was not concerned in making it really come to fruition.

3. Since Woocommerce has an actual shopping cart, it solves a problem that S2M doesn’t have: buying more than one product at a time (which we achieve now through ccaps). We’ll still need to leave S2M running on the hundreds of old posts we’ve already created until we get everything cleaned up.

But for now, it’s time we part ways and invest no more effort in S2M.

Cassel,

That’s exactly what we’re doing. If they have access to that CCAP, we wrap the download link inside the CCAP conditional shortcode. We’re also using “s2member_file_inline=no” in our code so that the file is forced to download rather than display in the browser. However, those who have access to that download link, for some strange reason, are getting redirected to the front page of the website. And that “inline” function doesn’t work as the PDFs always open in our browsers. Of course once the PDF is open we can save it, but sometimes clients just want to download and open later.

I really hope somebody posts a solution or a workaround to the problem.

Our site is lucky enough to have daily backups, so I reverted to our pre-1026 backup, because somehow overnight the front page of our website disappeared. Didn’t really have a choice, and the revert took us back to before the update.

But we’ve been experiencing on-going problems with our clients not being able to access files (sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t). It’s really infuriating that we all have angry clients and the technicians seem to be rolling out and delivering new problems, when things seemed to work fine before.