Bencredible

A little while back I wrote about the woes and troubles I was having trying to find a membership plugin for Wordpress that did everything I need. Here is the list of items I was looking for:

On-site credit card processing. If a potential customer has to go out, create a PayPal or other account, enter all their info, authorize the purchase and generally jump through hoops to get your product you may have lost them already. The credit card processing should be on site (secure of course), easy to use and International.

Affiliate program. My greatest evangelists are the users who already have the product and think it is awesome! Why not allow them to help sell the product and give them a kick back of each sale they make?

E-Mail marketing. Getting the customer is one step, retaining them is another. It is important to be able to communicate with everyone as to why their membership is valuable and what they are getting out of it. It is also important to allow the members to opt-out of said e-mails if they want to. The initial sale is just part of the process, keeping them is the other part.

Coupons. If I want to have a sale on the product, or give out coupons to sites that can offer a discount if they use code ‘PROMO1′ for example, I should be able to do that too! It is a great tool for cross-promotion of my content and their content.

Detailed reporting. I need to be able to see what is working and what isn’t working. What do the sales look like. Where are they coming from? How much am I making and how much has to go back out to affiliates?

Support. Pre-sales, installation and maintenance are all important. Getting the plugin to do exactly what you want will probably require a few hoops you’ll need to jump through, so you’ll probably find yourself leaning on the support team a lot more than expected.

So what did we do in the end? When it was all said and done I actually purchased three plugins to get just the right ones to fit our needs: Suma Plugin, Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass. The final plugin we went with was Digital Access Pass. Why? Because it does nearly everything on my features list and no other plugin comes even close!

When I originally wrote the article Digital Access Pass or DAP didn’t have a key feature which was on-site credit card processing. They now support on-site processing through Authorize.net or PayPay Payments Pro. We use Authorize.net and this is nice because I have full control over the merchant and what will be done. On the customers credit/debit card statement they won’t see ‘PayPal’ but rather ‘Spacevidcast.com’. It looks like a complete and total solution. Wishlist Member still to this day doesn’t support this feature, although their support department originally told me they did. Lame.

In addition DAP already had almost all of the other features I needed. The products and drip content are quite powerful. Far more powerful than Wishlist Member.  Suma doesn’t even have the ability to do drip products or one-off sales. E-mail marketing was already built in. Affiliates are built in and scary powerful. Issues I wouldn’t have even thought of were in place allowing the sales to be properly matched to a user no matter the scenario (check it out on their site, it is quite powerful). I have detailed reporting on what is happening with my account as soon as I log in to the admin dashboard. It was almost everything I needed.

One thing DAP is missing are coupons. I believe they are working on that though as I have seen rumblings of that on the blog.

It is worth pointing out that I tried all three. Suma was a close second. It had on-site credit card processing, support was simply amazing and the product worked well. The big problem with Suma was that it was only a recurring subscription product. It doesn’t do drip products or marketing, it doesn’t do e-mail campaigns, it doesn’t do affiliate programs and while you can hack in coupons it really doesn’t do them like you would expect.

The big plugin in the industry is Wishlist Member and going in to this project I thought it would be the product I would end up with. Boy was I wrong. Other people rant and rave about their support, but in my experience I found them to be the slowest in responding, when they did respond the answer was wrong and even after I asked for a refund I don’t think I ever got it. The product does drip products / marketing very, very poorly. Worst of all you have to go off-site, create an account with a third party and hope you don’t lose your customer in the process. No on-site credit card processing (no matter what their support team says). Wishlist does a great job of marketing themselves, but maybe if they spent a little less time making videos and a little more time adding features to keep up with DAP we would have gone down that road for Spacevidcast instead.

After a week long trial with each the clear winner was DAP. It is an evolving product and even after we launched there were new updates and great new revisions to the code. I know Suma is working on a v3 beta as well. I don’t think Wishlist Member has anything in the pipe, maybe a new video they are working on? If you’re looking for a new Wordpress membership plugin check out Digital Access Pass. Don’t get sucked in by flashy marketing, really look at the products. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did that DAP is hands down the best Wordpress Membership plugin on the Internet today.

If you want to see how we used this plugin in production hit up http://www.spacevidcast.com/epic and while you’re there… Maybe buy an epic subscription!

2010 may not be a great year for AT&T. While they have seen fantastic growth since the release of the iPhone, I believe their exclusive contract expires this year. Of course another hot phone consumers want and AT&T has is the… uh… nothing.

Today Google announced the Nexus One which will work on T-Mobile and soon Verizon. While you can get voice and EDGE access on AT&T there is no subsidized price and no 3G access for AT&T users. All the cool phones are going to Verizon and T-Mobile!

While all cell phone carriers are terrible, AT&T has some serious issues on the coasts where user density is highest. I was recently in California and needed to browse the web on my iPhone. Let me tell you what wasn’t working. Oh sure, I had full bars but there was no bandwidth to be had. It was the most painful experience I have ever had on a mobile device. So painful that I went to a Verizon store and purchased a MiFi so I could have working WiFi access. I actually kept that MiFi (a device that AT&T also does not carry) and we use it for remote Spacevidcast shoots at KSC and Space View Park. You can bet that many users on the coasts are with AT&T because they want the cool phone. But what happens when that cool phone is no longer locked to AT&T or worse yet not even available on AT&T?

I think 2010 will be the year that users flee AT&T en masse for other providers. They have been riding off the iPhone success for too long and not been able to keep up with demand. In the end I think the iPhone will have ended up hurting AT&T more than helping them. They now have a reputation that is soiled and it will take a miracle or two to put them back on top.

I’m considering dumping AT&T for a T-Mobile Nexus One. I’m concerned about T-Mobiles terrible 3G maps though. What do you think? I already have a AT&T account and a Verizon account… Maybe adding T-Mobile isn’t a bad idea. I do utilize each network quite a bit as I am a bleeding edge adopter. I used to have a Sprint account, but, well they can’t seem to do anything right anymore.

Comments?

Wow, with the number of posts I have made recently you would assume that I made a New Years resolution to blog more. Believe it or not, I didn’t! We just have a ton of stuff going on in getting ready for Spacevidcast 3.01 which is only 5 days away from this posting! I can tell right now that we won’t be done in time. Here are a few thoughts I had while we were driving around town trying to get our act together:

I also have some shots of the gear. This is the old ProjectMix I/O and the new Fast Track Ultra next to each other:

As always comments are welcome below. I like to start each year with a bang! All new graphics, all new set, all new everything! The show itself will be the same Spacevidcast you love, just better. This year we didn’t have the long break between seasons that we had last year, so I’m just not sure how much we can get done. Of course actually being on-air is more important than graphics, so we won’t miss this next week, but it is always nice to make a well produced show.

Thoughts?

I’ve never been happy with the live set for Spacevidcast. We could go with a virtual set, but until I can do a 4:4:4 chroma key allowing even the fibers of my hair to look natural (hint: very hard and expensive) I’ll probably stick to a traditional set.

One of the things that I *hate* with the current set is that it looks so news like. We’re behind a table talking at you, not with you. Completely wrong format for this show. The community is just as much a part of the show as we are. I want it to be more informal, more fun, less news like.

My thought was that we would get a couch and a chair. I would sit in the chair and Cariann would sit in the couch. In front of us maybe a coffee table where we would put our computers and possibly a drink (I’ll take a Hendrick’s and tonic with a cucumber, thank you). To do this right I would need 3 HD cameras (problem) and would probably stop putting the guest on the plasma monitor and only have them full screen and in the double box. Cariann and I went shopping and after searching for a while determined we may want to just do two chairs and two side tables. Here’s an interesting option from Ikea:

And the side tables would be so we have something to put our computers on. Something like one of these:

OK, well the red is a bit out there and we would not do that if we got orange chairs. These also come in white.

I still have a HUGE issue with the background. Cafn8ed came up with a nifty idea of some white foam and the possibility to cover it with a graphic of sorts. I go back and forth on that one. Could do some cool things with lights, but as I think about it more and more I fear it will just end up being bland without any kick. Maybe that’s OK. Like I said, back and forth. I could also take the current HDTV and put it back behind us with a Spacevidcast animation of sorts. No idea what to do back there that won’t look cheap and cheesy while at the same time not spending a lot of money. The white sheet really doesn’t work well, just looks like a giant white bedsheet. We could go back to black and then shine something on that to give it some color. Orange chairs and orange lights on the background may look sorta cool.

Of course I fell in love with something we can’t afford. I really like these chairs, but they are $3,500 each. At that price I would get two new HD cameras rather than chairs! But they sure would look cool!

What do you guys think? Stick with the news like desk? Make it more informal and conversational? I like the general idea of what Ashton did in the video below. Nice chair, nice couch, table and interesting background (although the background needs some love still). What do you think?