Do you need a membership website?

I often get a number of messages from entrepreneurs at our support desk asking if a membership website is right for them. Often they also describe what their business looks like and the way they want to charge their clients.

It is obviously the most important question if you are about to start a website.

But it is quite easy to determine if a membership website is right for you or not! You need a membership website if any of the following three cases matches with what you want to do:

1) If you need to have some protected area at your website. It can be acheieved by limiting access to webpages only to your subscribed/paid clients. Your clients will be required to enter a username and a password to access those webpages. You must have seen this structure at a number of websites.

2) If want to charge your subscribers/paid clients more than once. For example, you may want to charge your subscribers $0 for first week (trial period) and then $50 each month. Or perhaps you would want to set two trial periods like ($5 for first week, $10 for next week) and then a regular amount of $50 each month. Further, you may want to set the number of periods they will be charged, e.g. a subscription period  of 12 months or you may want to charge them as long as they do not cancel the subscription at their will.

3) You may also need a membership website if you want to charge your clients in more than one installment. Suppose you are selling a higher-priced product (for example, worth $2000) and you want to allow your clients to pay you in installments (of $500 for next 4 months).

So, you know you need a membership website, if any of the above three cases matches with what you want to do. Perhaps, there are even more such cases which I could not think of at this moment, help me in figuring out those.