Digital Access Pass is a powerful membership script that allows you to build a membership site either within your WordPress blog or on an HTML website.
When you think of recurring income and passive profits, you often think of a membership site. But installing and configuring the software to handle memberships can be pretty frustrating. I know. While All Quality PLR was still in the planning stages, I installed and tested several options, and I found most of them to be complicated to install and confusing to use, or they just didn’t offer the features I was looking for – like affiliate tracking. I looked seriously at three options (You can see a comparison chart of all three on DAP’s website.): Amember, Digital Access Pass, and WishList, and finally settled on DAP, for a variety of reasons.
Digital Access Pass Pros
- Easy to install – although the DAP team will do the install for free if you request it. I found installing DAP to be no more difficult than installing any other plug-in.
- One-time fee – unlike hosted solutions, there is no monthly recurring charge for DAP. Though there is a charge for upgrades after six months.
- Affiliate tracking – unlike WishList, DAP has a built-in affiliate tracking program.
- Seamless integration with WordPress – unlike Amember (which requires a paid plug-in) DAP works within your WordPress installation.
- Built-in autoresponder – build your list without need for any third-party service.
- Integration with Aweber – if you want a more robust solution for your mailing list, DAP meshes nicely with Aweber.
- Fantastic customer service – Ravi and Veena are both quick to answer any questions you have.
- Handles single products as well as recurring fees, so it’s useful for membership sites and as a simple shopping cart.
- Protects digital files from unauthorized downloads, so you don’t have to worry about paid users sharing your download URL.
Digital Access Pass Cons
- No inventory tracking – if you limit quantities like I do at All Quality PLR, you’ll need to find another way to track sales. I do it manually, but you could also use a separate shopping cart.
- Since you host the software, you’re also responsible for maintenance, up-time, and backups.
- No tracking of affiliate SSNs for tax reporting purposes. If you have affiliates that earn more than $600 (and you’re in the US) you’ll need to contact them individually to arrange to send them a W-9.
Digital Access Pass Pricing
For a single license for use on one domain, DAP runs $167, which is comparable to other software of this class (Amember, specifically). But unlike Amember, it doesn’t require a bunch of (paid) plug-ins to work with your other tools, such as Aweber and WordPress.
Overall, I find Digital Access Pass to be easy to install, simple to use, and quite powerful enough for my needs. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t use all the features DAP has to offer, but I’m sure that as my needs grow, DAP will easily accommodate them. The recent update to include coupon codes for use with PayPal (along with being able to make a PayPal button from within the DAP dashboard) is proof of that. If you’re looking for membership site software, I highly recommend Digital Access Pass.
Thanks for this, there were a few details you mentioned in regards to tracking sales that I didn’t realize DAP didn’t cover. Hopefully that’s something they add in the future, I’m hoping to put together something later this year with membership on the backend.
Hi Loretta,
The only thing I really miss with DAP is the ability to track quantities. PayPal will do it in a rudimentary way, sending you an email when your “stock” is depleted, but that doesn’t update the “quantity available” line on your site. But for me, the other features far outweighed this minor inconvenience.
And I probably didn’t make it clear, but DAP integrates with 1ShoppingCart (and the developers sell a white label version of that as well) so it can handle these and other shopping cart features that way. For what I’m doing, I don’t need a shopping cart – nor do I want to pay the monthly fee – so I’m choosing to work through this another way.
Thanks for commenting!
Excellent overview Cindy.
How hard did you find it to customize DAP and make it look “pretty”? Ive seen some less than appealing dap sites in the past and wasn’t sure how hard it was to customize.
I’ve been using amember for year and while there are a lot of things I don’t like (slow customer support replies being one of them), I do like the way their affiliate tracking works. Any customer your send my way becomes yours for life – no cookies etc. Even if they order something 2 years down the road from a different computer you’ll get the commission. Makes it easy for me to attract affiliates.
Hi Susanne,
Since DAP works within WordPress, it’s not hard at all to customize the pages. It comes with a default set up, which is, as you said, less than appealing. But you can also use short-codes on WordPress pages and posts to present the same information (affiliate stats, products you’ve bought, etc.) in a much more attractive way.
I wasn’t sure of the answer to your second question so I emailed Ravi (the developer) and he tells me that DAP sets a lifetime cookie with the last click getting the commission. However, once a sale is made, all subsequent sales are tied to the affiliate forever. In other words, once a customer buys through your link, it won’t matter how many other links she clicks, all sales will be attributed to you. Hope that makes sense!
Thanks for the thought provoking question!
Cindy
Digital access pass for wordpress is a great idea, like a subscription system. But we should have very strong content otherwise it wont work at all.
Hi Salsan, thanks for stopping by.
You’re right, of course. Without great content a membership site isn’t going to go very far. That should always be your first job on any site – lots of useful content.