Magic Members is a wordpress plug in, claiming to have it all. Mainly it’s the only plug-in i found with CCBill integration, which is exactly what I was looking for. I got super excited even before I got to their page.
Once on magicmembers.com, I was in heaven. It does everything I’m looking for and on top of everything they have great customer suport! The price? Who cares!!! It has CCBill integration built in! I’m making thousands of dollars a day, I can afford two hundred dollar plug in! Even if they ask few thousand dollars for it, I’ll probably take it.
Ok, here is the catch! If it looks too good to be true, it’s probably NOT!
I rebuild one of my sites especially because of this plug in. Maybe I should have done more research about these guys, but why? Their site looks so nice, so organized so convincing! They also own few “review” sites about themselves. Now that is something. I’ll make a product and I’ll build few more sites bragging about my product. It’s just so disappointing. What is?
While trying to install the plug in, I have contacted magic members customer support few times. I have gotten few responses, they were on the colder side, but who cares right? As long as they make this thing work and they stay 100% behind their product, I’m fine. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
This is what happened: When a visitor subscribed on my site, they were taken to ccbill form to pay. Then, they were re-directed back to my site. Unfortunately, their username and password did not work. Oh, it was in the wordpress system, but on default the membership status was set to inactive. I have spent whole holidays changing members status, answering complains and updating passwords. All while waiting to hear from magic members customer support. Yeah, and when they actually responded, they were always blaming me for having the wrong settings.
I even gave them admin access to my site. I provided snapshots from ccbill settings. I offered to provide ccbill access to my account to fix this. NEVER HEARD BACK from Magic Members people!
There’s more! If you have running site with subscribers, when you import them to your new magicmembers enabled wordpress site, they will all be set to INACTIVE. So if you have 20 or 2000 members, you’ll have to go through them, one by one and change their status to active before they will leave you forever.
Dear Magic Members staff, I still have the same email, my message is still in your Open Tickets system.
Did I mentioned that the magic members plug-in also messes up your javascript on NextGen Gallery?
If you have or are considering this plug-in, let’s hear it!
I was about to buy this for a new site I am working on. Glad I saw your review before buying. Thanks!
Sure, I hate for someone to go through it. In our business we know, how hard it is to keep customer. We need a seamless solution, not a headache for them.
Thanks for the heads up! Any response from the company? I’d hate to have a similar experience
Contacted them again, they responded with a link to an update. It’s been only a couple of days, since the update, I’m not sure if all is fixed. Looks like the email problem is resolved.
Thank you for your review. I would love to hear from more users before i go and pay for this plug in. Its a new plugin and prob has not been tested taking into consideration all the other plugins that will be running next to it. They are prob expecting that you are running this plugin with the most basic wordpress website.
I am also a photographer and adult webmaster… 14 years in the game now. I am blown away you’d take a chance using wordpress as your CMS. With all due respect, this is a rookie error, you’re putting a lot at risk here. WordPress is not stable enough to handle multiple mysql pulls when it comes into photos/video. Not remotely close if you plan to have more then 50 members anyway. If you need help getting set up, hit me up.
Also, where’s your affiliate program?
thx
James, thanks for the comment. I’d have to agree, however, I’m very happy with wordpress as a CMS. We have been using different CMS systems, I made this decission on my own and believe me, I did considered other options. Things are changing fast in this business as you I’m sure’d agree.
Oh, and having the gust to advertise it.
Trying to stay in the game is one thing, being ahead is another. We’re not huge, but for ONE model websites and NON NUDE, I think, we’ve kicked some major beep. WordPress gives me all I need and much more. Yes, of course, no system is perfect, some may come close.
However, having companies out there claiming their product works etc., that is what we should somehow eliminate. The bull out there. People writing few lines of code and call it a plug-in.
Hi!
I was of course to late to discover this review as I stumbled upon the same problem.
I bought Magic Members two days ago and it seemed to work ok. I am lucky that I have not opened the site publicly yet, because when I tested out how the registering was working I also found out you can not log in afterwards. I also found out that you had to set the account to ‘active’ manually.
I have been waiting for support for a day now…..
The site I make it for is a non-profit organisation and actually don’t need any payment checkouts.
I bought just for the custom registering forms and inegration with mailproviders like for instance Mailchimp and Aweber.
Anyone know of a alternavtive?
Because I understand I can get my money back withing 30 days.
Dennis
I have had problems as well. Since upgrading to the new plug-in, user can’t upgrade their FREE accounts to paid accounts.
Also, users are never e-mailed their account info, and subscriptions which expire cannot be renewed or extended!
I’m stuck.
Time for someone to write a better solution!
We are using Magic Members with eWay payment gateway for 3 months. Magic Members failing to update some members and their credit card charged by eWay. When they can not login they try to renew the account and Magic Members billing them for the second time. Magic Members tech support pretending to be trying to resolve this. But after three months we still have customers calling in and their accounts Magic Members failed to update their accunts while eWay billed their credit cards. I do not recommend Magic Members for paid services.