Memberships are a great way to generate recurring revenue from your readers.

Memberships are ideal if you want to charge on a set schedule, and optionally include your magazine when it is released.

Memberships typically include special benefits for your members, like access to extra content, early access to new issues, or input into the magazine.

Membership product options

There are a few options for selling memberships in Subsail. Here's a quick breakdown of each:

Include magazines

When creating a membership product, you can choose to include your magazine in the membership by setting the Include magazine in membership option to Yes.

If you choose to include your magazine, your members will be automatically assigned a copy of the magazine when an issue is released within an active billing period. You control issue release dates from your Issues page.

If you choose not to include your magazine, your members will not receive a copy of the magazine when it is released.

Digital memberships

Digital memberships will not ask for a shipping address at checkout. Use digital memberships when you only want to offer digital perks or online-only benefits.

Creating products

To sell a new membership product, go to your Sell page in your account and click Sell a new membership.

In the membership form, you can configure the membership product:

• Price (price per period)
• Name
• Benefits (a list of benefits that will be shown to the subscriber at checkout)
• Billing interval (monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, or yearly)
• Billing schedule (either set renewals on the 1st of every month, or on the sign up date)
• Medium (print + digital or digital only)
• Include magazines (whether to include the magazine in the membership)

Setting rates for different countries

You may want to charge different prices for different countries, based on any physical, shippable benefits you offer.

Country prices you add also determine the location of customers who are able to purchase your membership. Any countries not listed will not be able to purchase your subscriptions. An "Everywhere else" option that can be used to set a default price.

Tax

Read how to add tax to your memberships.

Linking to checkout

When you are ready to sell to readers, you can add a link to <your-site>.subsail.com/subscribe on your site or on social media.

If you want to link to specific membership products, there is Copy link option when hovering over the product in your Sell page.

Hiding memberships from checkout

You can hide membership products from checkout by setting the Show in shop option to No.

When hidden, direct links to the membership product will still work but the product will not be visible in your checkout.

Offering benefits

Most memberships will include special benefits for your members.

You can list benefits at checkout by adding them to the Benefits field when creating a membership product. This list will be shown in the product's box at checkout when using the Horizontal cards products view.

To give access to these benefits after purchase, you can use the API, integrations or CSV exports to manage access or permissions in other systems.

Subsail will automatically add magazine issues to memberships when "Include magazines" is toggled on. Every copy assigned to a member is easily managed within Subsail, just like with subscriptions.