It tries to do to much and fails at the essential things!

Edit: 2019 – after an exodus of the developers – s2member is finally back on track. And for many of my problems – there are 3rd party solutions.
For Invoices and VAT quaderno.io supports s2member.
email reminders have been added and since 2019 there is again support.

In principal s2member is a great plugin – from the possibilities you get with it, it is pretty awesome for a membership plugin.

However there are a couple of catches that are simply not acceptable if you intend to really make money with your website!

1. NO INVOICES whatsoever. Yes you got that right, basically this plugin is impossible to use if you don’t geoblock all EU customers using geoblocking plugins! IN EU you now need to write correct invoices following the VATMOSS directive. S2member cannot even write invoices at all – so this alone ruins it.

2. No working VAT model. You cannot properly set up VAT charging at all. It will not base the VAT on anything but user entered data. No IP checks, no country codes / credit card country codes checking from payment processor. So again – impossible if you have a single sale to EU! – what’s worse – there is not even a possibility to have your user enter his full address on checkout. Checkout is instead only offering State, Country, Zipcode – not city, no nothing…

3. No email reminders without using additional plugins from 3rd party vendors. So suppose membership of a user is ending. There are no emails sent out to the user to remind him to prolong his membership. So basically you will lose out 30-40% turnover just because of this if you don’t buy additional plugins.
(finally fixed – about 5 years after initial requests for this important function)

4. Support – what is that? If the support doesn’t like your question they simply ignore it. E.g. anything on the above shortcomings.

So in principle it’s a great plugin, but it misses essential things and therefore I can only recommend it for non paying membership sites. It has really great functionality, but the polishing is simply missing and means basically if you use it professionally you better start hiring lawyers to defend you from EU and soon Japan authorities (as long as you live within any OECD country – e.g. also USA) because s2member makes it impossible to correctly attribute VAT and invoices. (you are liable from your first 0,01€ sale to pay VAT to an EU country if your customer resides in EU for digital products such as memberships.)

Right now the only way to stay more or less legal is to only allow Stripe as payment processor (meaning purchasing s2member pro) and pay for Octobat.com to manage your invoicing. (plus using a renaming plugin like say-what to change state to city).

• This topic was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by extremecarver. Reason: Changes