Membership plugin or paywall service: which a WordPress site needs

Sites that sell access to content usually choose between two kinds of tool. They solve the same problem from opposite ends.

A membership plugin

A membership plugin runs inside WordPress. It takes payments (through a payment gateway it connects to), stores who has paid for what in the WordPress database, and locks content against that record.

Good at: one bill for everything, full control, no per-member fee to a third party.
The catch: WordPress becomes your billing system. Renewals, failed payments, refunds, taxes and receipts all run in the plugin, and the member record lives only on that site.

A paywall service

A hosted paywall service runs on its own servers. A script or an API on your site asks it who the reader is and whether to show the article; the service handles checkout, subscriptions and often metering and analytics.

Good at: publishing-specific tools such as metering, offers and propensity scoring, with nothing to host.
The catch: the reader record and the payment relationship live with the service, usually for a share of revenue or a monthly fee. Paywalls that hide content in the browser can also leak it to anyone who reads the HTML.

Where RedeemID fits

RedeemID is neither. Shopify is the shop: checkout, subscriptions, refunds, taxes and the customer account all stay there. WordPress is the site: RedeemID signs customers in with their Shopify account, mirrors the tags Shopify keeps on them, and locks content on the server against those tags.

Billing stays in Shopify. WordPress never stores a grant Shopify doesn’t know about, so cancelling in Shopify ends access on the site.
The reader is your Shopify customer. One account for the store and the site, and it’s yours, not a service’s.
The paywall is server-side. Locked text never reaches the page for someone who can’t read it.
It’s free. No per-member fee and no revenue share; see Pricing.

It suits a site that already sells on Shopify, or wants to. A site that has no store and wants WordPress to bill is better served by a membership plugin; a large publisher that wants a vendor to run metering experiments may want a paywall service.

See Membership plugins for running RedeemID beside one.

Written for: Membership sites, Agencies

More guides

How to gate WordPress content with Shopify customer tags Lock WordPress posts, categories or part of a page to customers who carry a tag in Shopify: connect the store, name a level, add a gate or a rule, and check what each reader sees.
Turn a Shopify purchase into WordPress membership access The whole path from a paid Shopify order to an open WordPress page: a Flow workflow tags the buyer, the tag reaches WordPress by webhook, a level opens the content, and the return link brings the buyer back.
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