A Valuable Opportunity
As eCommerce and online shopping have become more commonplace, membership websites are becoming a popular way for businesses to meet the growing needs of modern consumers.
People are able to find jobs, spouses, places to live, education, and nearly everything else on membership sites. Creating a service or product that is easily accessible to consumers quickly attracts a dedicated audience. All they have to do is run their card through a gateway credit card payment system, and they get exactly what they need whenever and wherever they want.
Membership sites are a great way to provide a valuable service to your customer base while maintaining a consistent revenue stream for your business.
What Is a Membership Site?
Membership websites typically focus on products or services that cater towards education, lifestyle, or delivering consumables. Since they are exclusive, members often feel that they belong to a community, fostering loyalty and excitement around a brand. While some membership sites are free, most require a monthly or yearly subscription fee.
Learning Sites
One common example of a membership site is a learning site. These are sites that offer a never-ending stream of valuable skills, lessons, and other educational resources to its members. For example, a premium yoga membership site may offer classes that members can enjoy in the comfort of their own home at either $9 per month or a one-time gateway credit card payment of $89 per year.
This online membership business model presents itself as more affordable than a typical membership at a yoga studio, some of which can cost over $200 per month. In this way, they are able to offer a service that not only holds tremendous value for their customer base, but is also affordable enough to keep members paying month after month.
Learning sites can educate members in nearly any topic, whether it’s in learning how to play an instrument, discovering new artistic techniques, or exploring new techniques for cooking.
Lifestyle Sites
Another common membership website category are lifestyle sites. These are websites that provide members with services that can better their personal lives, such as dating sites that pair members with spouses or work sites that helps members build networks with professionals.
Lifestyle sites help their members feel empowered to meet their potential. Members are provided with the tools and resources they need to find a better job, meet a partner, lose weight, find clothes, or improve their life in any number of ways.
Consumable Sites
Currently, consumables are the fastest growing membership sites. These sites are popular in that they meet the needs of modern consumers with easy purchase and instant delivery.
Consumable sites provide members with products they want and need delivered right to their door. Whether it’s a subscription box that delivers high quality shaving products, an assortment of hand-selected cosmetics, or even pre-planned meals, its members are often captivated by a low monthly fee. This type of membership site is becoming increasingly popular with today’s modern consumer.
Some consumable membership sites are joined purely for fun, wherein members receive a new mystery box each month, while others fulfill day-to-day needs.
Popularity
With options becoming highly varied and niche, membership websites are becoming more popular. While traditional membership sites like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Spotify are still industry leaders, smaller sites are also finding incredible success. Nonetheless, people are flocking to use a gateway credit card payment system to give a site their money.
Some of the most popular categories for membership websites include:
- Weight Loss
- Fitness and Exercise
- Health
- Entertainment
- Finance
- Marketing
- Self-Improvement
Membership sites provide an excellent opportunity to capture recurring customer purchases. Large membership sites like Netflix have over 80 million members paying fees every month, yet smaller, new sites attract a large amount of members as well.
While other businesses are stretching towards impressive metrics, such as Amazon Prime’s 54 million members paying $99 a year, start-ups can make up to $200,000 per month, even with a humble customer base.
Benefits of Membership Sites
There are many benefits to running a membership site—the first being recurring revenue. Many traditional business owners have difficulty managing cash flow caused by the unpredictable nature of consumer purchasing. Since membership sites offer consistent revenue streams, issues like gateway credit card payment system breakdowns, cash flow management, accounting, and reinvesting become less volatile for new business owners.
Another benefit of membership sites is the community of members created around the product or service. The most successful membership sites create loyalty around a culture, which can be instantly identified across any number of digital platforms.
Downsides of Membership Sites
As with any business venture, there are potential downsides to running a membership site. First and foremost is struggling to deliver the product or service. If your site delivers content, it needs to be updated continuously with high quality videos, articles, sources of entertainment, or educational materials. Likewise, if your site provides a product, like a subscription box, it must be delivered in a timely manner and meet the quality standards of your customers base.
Commitment to your product and service is a continuous struggle that requires dedication and passion. When your company’s commitment to the customer wanes, the quality of your service suffers, consequently leading to customers cancelling their memberships.
Consistency is Key
It’s crucial to maintain constant marketing. Your site needs to run uninterrupted promotions to attract new members and keep your services fresh for its current members.
Though you may assume that once you’ve garnered a certain amount of members, you can take a step back from recruitment, considering that consumers desire the latest services, there is a need for a consistent flow of new members.
Technical Challenges
Every web-based business needs to pay special attention to technical issues. If your business model is based on members visiting your website, your site needs to work properly and be easy to navigate, as well as enjoyable to use. If your servers crash or your gateway credit card payment system stops working, you can quickly lose your membership base and find it difficult to attract new members.
In short, the downsides of running a membership site are similar to the downside of running any business—you need to commit every resource to providing an excellent experience for your customer base every time they visit your site.
Dangers of Memberships Sites
As with any online business, there are dangers associated with running it. The most common issue facing membership sites, or any eCommerce website, is security. Your members need to feel safe providing you with their personal and financial information when they use your gateway credit card payment system.
Data Security
Data security is a major issue these days. Scammers use fake accounts, plant viruses, and phish for sensitive information and money. If hackers access your members’ information through your gateway credit card payment system, they may use fake emails to scam members into giving away personal information.
Hackers may also attempt to install a virus on your company’s server to force access to sensitive information about your members, including their credit card information.
Membership Site Attacks
Hackers have successfully attacked membership sites in the past. Popular sites and stores like Zappos, eBay, and Target were recently hacked, allowing thieves to compromise millions of credit card accounts and capture sensitive personal and financial information.
Protection
Even with the dangers of data theft, online shopping is still a safe way for consumers to make purchases. Offering your clients high-end security measures during gateway credit card payment system usage will give them the peace of mind they need to become a member of your website.
How do you provide your clients with a seamless online payment process with an integrated top-notch security system? The answer is Allied Wallet.
We Keep Data Safe
Keeping your members’ information safe and secure should be a top priority of your business. Allied Wallet’s gateway credit card payment options provide your clients with an easy-to-use payment process that provides state-of-the-art security measures.
We keep your members’ financial information safe and secure with our customisable security features. We offer PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance on all payment transactions with a security standard that specifies 12 interconnected requirements to protect cardholders, the network, and your business.
We also offer SHA-256 SSL encryption that ensures each financial transaction is protected by data encryption algorithms designed by the National Security Agency (NSA). Providing security to your members with customisable Fraud Scrub, AML protection, and First Data Certification is where Allied Wallet excels.
We offer the latest security measures to ensure your members financial and personal information remains safe and secure.
Billing Structure
Membership websites often bill members on a recurring platform, so you need a gateway credit card payment provider that can meet the complex needs of your billing structure. Depending on the structure of your billing options, you may need to bill monthly, annually, or even provide introductory rates to entice members to sign up for your service.
You need a payment processor that allows you to seamlessly bill on a variety of payment plans throughout each payment cycle. Allied Wallet offers subscription, membership, repeating, tiered, and trial payment options that are easy to organize, track, and process.
Management Tools
Managing your client information is paramount to running a successful membership website. You need a payment provider that has the tools and programs that allow you to track and manage the payment plan of each member.
Organizing and tracking member information not only helps you manage your billing, it also allows you to understand the metrics of your business, thereby helping you to streamline what works and what doesn’t.
The World is Your Market
Membership websites aren’t limited by physical boundaries and borders—your members can be anywhere in the world. If your website quality provides content, there is truly no limit to where you can find new members.
To give you the flexibility that allows you to expand your customer base around the globe, Allied Wallet offers payment process in 196 countries and 164 different currencies. Since membership sites provide a great opportunity to conduct business internationally, Allied Wallet can help you sort and organize between many different currencies simultaneously.
Customer Service
Although you may not consider customer service a necessary component of the gateway credit card payment process, it most certainly should be. Running a membership site means your clients will be online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
You need to ensure that your site and payment portal work perfectly at all hours of the day. Great customer support entails a real solution to any problem that is implemented quickly and efficiently at anytime.
Allied Wallet offers customer support around the clock to ensure that all issues will be taken care of as quickly as possible, regardless of the time of day.
Put Your Members at Ease with Allied Wallet
A membership site is a great business opportunity. You get devote your passions to work, while providing your customers with a valuable and meaningful service or product.
When you partner with Allied Wallet, you provide your members with an easy, seamless gateway credit card payment process. You also ensure that their personal sensitive data and information is protected by an industry leader in online security.
Allied Wallet is much more than just a payment processor, we are a true business partner. Offering data management tools, global opportunity, and state-of-the-art security, let Allied Wallet become an invaluable member of your business community.
Find out what Allied Wallet can do for your membership website.
