Dear subscribers,
Since going live in April 2023, CnEVData has gained a lot of support from our readers, especially institutional investors and analysts, which we didn't initially anticipate.
We initially chose Patreon, a platform trusted by many and familiar to us, as the payment gateway, saving us a lot of effort.
Using Patreon as a payment gateway required us to use one of their recommended paid plugins as a paywall for the site.
For the past year or so, this solution has been running stable without any technical issues.
However, we started receiving feedback from some of our subscribers last week that they were blocked by the paywall even though they were logged into their accounts.
We quickly provided a temporary solution for these subscribers -- setting them up as VIPs so that their access would not be affected.
We also spent a lot of time testing the accounts of our entire subscriber base and found that about a third were experiencing the same issue. We set up all of these accounts the same way, so you may not feel the experience fluctuate, even if your account is affected.
In the meantime, we contacted the developer of the plugin for a solution. However, the process was very disappointing for us.
After we submitted our first feedback, it took the plugin developer 5 days before providing their first response, which simply said that there was no problem with their plugin.
After we provided multiple further feedbacks, we have not received any more replies to date.
This was unacceptable to us. So we made up our mind to ditch the solution.
To be clear, the fault does not lie with Patreon, but with the paywall plugin they recommended.
Now, we have chosen Memberful as our new payment gateway. We have been using Memberful on CnEVPost for several months and have verified its stability.
Memberful is a great team that responds promptly to any queries we have and comes up with very thoughtful solutions.
The team was acquired by Patreon a few years ago, so we are actually still using one of Patreon's services.
Memberful has seamlessly integrated the payment and login experience with both of our websites, and this experience is much better than the previous solution that required subscribers to log into Patreon to access content on CnEVData.com.
Now, to log in to CnEVData.com, all you need to do is click on the “Sign In” button and enter your email address to complete your login via the email you receive.
After several days of work, we have completed the migration of payment plans and have transferred existing subscriber information to Memberful, including subscription plans, expiration dates.
The only issue is that the payment information cannot be synchronized from Patreon to Memberful. So subscribers need to update their card information in their account information in order for the subscription to be uninterrupted.
Memberful uses Stripe, one of the largest and most secure financial service providers in the world, to process payments. Your card information is only stored in Stripe and is not visible to us nor to Memberful. We can only see the last four digits of the card number.
If you wish to know more, you can read this link: https://cnevdata.com/membership/
Feel free to contact us with any questions: phate@cnevdata.com
Phate Zhang
Founder of CnEVData & CnEVPost
October 4, 2024