I hope this article can give you some real insight into using a Clickfunnels membership site, and help you avoid some of the confusion, frustration, and negative customer experience (for your customers) as what happened to me.

Although I think Russell Brunson is a great guy, and highly inspiring, when I actually tried Clickfunnels and transferred my hundreds of members from my Wishlist membership site to Clickfunnels, I had months of headaches, tech support, and utter confusion to follow.

This is my Clickfunnels review of their membership site. Please be weary, and test, test, test before considering switching your business over to clickfunnels, or launching your membership site on Clickfunnels. I am writing this article because I wish I had known this before I made the jump.

My Clickfunnels Membership Site Review (And Why I Left)

Client Accounts Mysteriously Disappearing From Clickfunnels

As an owner of a membership site, you expect a few things to happen:

• The client can sign up, and easily pay for their product

• The client is able to easily access their membership login info

• The profile of the client continue to function and work- the client can login to their profile and does not have their login details mysteriously disappear

Unfortunately this was not the case, as I found out. I would have clients who would sign up to access my membership site, be able to use it for a few sessions and then upon return, not be able to access it.

At first, I was confused, and it took a few different occurrences of this happening for me to recognize that was what Clickfunnels was doing was simply deleting the purchase from the client’s account so they were unable to access their content.

I’m very lucky that my community is patient, and kind and so they were positive as we worked through this. However providing an excellent customer service experience is very important to me, and so I was disappointed that my customers had to go through this.

For me as the business owner, it caused a slew of anxiety and stress as I never knew when the next complaint, or customers unable to access their trainings was going to come from.

Counterintuitive Set-Up To Gain Access To The Membership Site

Another cause of issues was how the clients received access to their membership content. If you are new to clickfunnels and setting this up, I want you to be aware that setting up access to your membership site is a two-step process.

In part one, the client will purchase.

Then, you have to find your “Secret Sign up Code” and link from the purchase page of the product to the secret sign up page where your customer can make a login.

Clickfunnels will search through your customers’ emails, and if the emails line up, you client will be able to gain access.

This caused some confusion, as many people who signed up would use a different email to pay, than they would to access their account. It would lead to many people paying and wondering how to find their content, not realizing they needed to use the same email.

If you are setting this up, make a note to your clients explicitly to use the same email for sign up as they do for purchase in order to access the content.

Doorway To Spam

Quickly after setting up my Clickfunnels account, I started to see hundreds of sign ups, before I had even driven traffic to the page. At first I was excited, but then I soon realized that these were hundreds of spam accounts. Accounts from name@mail.ru, name@163.com and other emails attached to subdomains that were somehow signing up for my membership site without paying.

There could often be 50-100 a day, and there was no way to delete these in an easy fashion. The only way would be for me to one-by-one go through and click edit> delete these accounts.

Of course, as a solopreneur, there is no way I could do this without sacrificing being on top of other areas of my business, and it was not a smart use of time for my part-time assistant as well.

This led to me paying fees in my email automation service for emails that we’re not even tied to a real person.

I found this article by Miles Beckler where he seemed to have the same situation.

Your Payments Are Not Integrated Fully

I assumed that using a solution as pricy as clickfunnels, that the payments would be integrated and that a client would be able to click a ‘cancel’ button and have their payments, and account canceled easily.

They are not integrated, so although clickfunnels will charge your client and provide them with login access, if a client wishes to cancel their membership site with you, they will email you and you will have to manually cancel their account in clickfunnels and your payment platform (such as stripe).

This can add a lot of work to your plate as a solopreneur, so you may want to consider only offering products that have a one-time pay.

You Still Have To Pay For Your Own External Email Automation Software

In the Clickfunnels webinar I attended, it seemed like EVERYTHING worked together magically and you would not need an external software.

This was not the case, at the very least you will need to get your own external email automation tools, or set up an SMTP to manage your emails. I decided to use my own email automation service, and because of the aforementioned spam, ended up paying much higher fees than necessary as I was being charged for the spam accounts that were signing up for my list but were not real people.

Links Mysteriously Going Down

This proves true when I even went through Russell Brunson’s very own funnel as he was launching his book “Expert Secrets” book and arrived at a broken link in his funnel. The irony.

I would constantly receive emails from my community that links were down in my clickfunnels membership site (for NO reason at all) and so my loyal clients would not be able to access their content.

My community and customers are female entrepreneurs who are also looking to grow their own businesses, and often they are doing their homework in the limited time available to them outside of their side-hustles. When links are broken, it can really set them back and discourage them!

There is no excuse for links going down without cause.

This led to hours of extra customer service (and feeling like a tech person) when I really should be focusing on helping my community and creating content (my favorite part of my job)

This is my personal experience with using the Clickfunnels membership site. It is completely truthful.

I have heard from many people that for a simple sales page with upsell functionality, Clickfunnels is a beast, and I can not contest that. However, I tried a Clickfunnels membership site and after months of struggling, overwhelm,  and wondering if I had lost my mind I’ve decided to leave it behind.

My saving grace was one Clickfunnels support member, Rob, who went above and beyond to try to help me out. He really knew what was going on, and really tried to remedy my issues. If you’re currently dealing with support at clickfunnels not able to answer your questions, talk to Rob. He’s the best.

After months of stress, confusion, feeling like an IT person in my own business, I made the jump and left Clickfunnels once and for all. I want to build an incredible space for my clients, and I can’t do that on a quicksand foundation.

I am now currently using my original solution Wishlist member, and pairing it with an incredible shopping cart tool, that has a lot of the incredible functionality that Clickfunnels claimed to have like One-click upsells and downsells.

It’s been a super seamless experience, and I’m so glad to finally feel stable with the tech in my business, using software that I 100% can rely on.

I am using Active Campaign for my emails, Wishlist Member for my membership site, creating a gorgeous LMS system, wordpress pages and landing pages with Thrive Themes and tying it together with an incredible shopping cart software. (aff links).

UPDATE: I’ve created a really complete update on what I used to create my membership site. Click here to read the full article, and you can also sign up for my free membership site training webinar, and checklist.