I have just taken over a site running Account Manager Pro for my membership and am looking at upgrading to something else. The main functionality I am looking for is a way for members to renew by entering their credit card details on the site as currently I am billing offline and using the previous details kept on file and find that I have to email just about half the renewals for up to date card information so to have them enter their current info on renewal would be more efficient. The site also offers a discounted price for renewals so is there a way to handle that simply with this program. How easy is it to integrate this program into my current pages. Do I need to change a whole heap of code.?? Can my members change their own password?? When a member chooses to pay by credit card how am I notified of the card number if I process offline?? The current setup with Account Manager Pro is that I receive an email with the card details in the body of the message along with the name and address etc which I don't feel is a very secure system. I also have an opt in free newsletter which is managed with The Follow Up Mailing List Processor. Can aMember send out the newsletter to both the free list and paid members from the one system so that I don't have to run a separate program for each thing as at the moment I am running a banner ad manager, mailing list manager and account manager and it can get a little messy at times. I guess what I am looking for is something that is easy for my site visitors to work with as the target audience are over 50's and many are newbies with computers and also something that will free up my time so that I can devote the savings to other things on the site. I am happy to provide my url if that helps understand my questions.
Have to agree that what you are doing now is terribly insecure! I have not used aMember in a way that requires this, but I imagine Alex could do it as a customisation if it is not already available. Extremely easy. You just need to edit te header and footer files and, if you wish, the CSS and you are done. Yes. And address details and so on if you are using them. Yes. You can send to any group or subgroup - for example just to members with a specific subscription. However it is more an email funtion than a newsletter one really - it lacks some things that fully fledged newsletter/mailing list programs would have, such as saving previous messages and so on. You can however use tags to personalise messages and so on. In my case the mailing members function was not enough so I use the available plugin for ListMailPro and thus it is integrated with aMember - I have only one database to maintain.
It is always insecure to keep credit card info on your site, so we always suggest to do it on dedicated servers only. aMember encrypts credit card info, but it is not 100% safe anyway. If someone hack your server, he will get this info it he is smart enough.