How 2,500 Members Moved to MemberPress Without a Single Payment Interrupted

Global Leadership Network, the organization behind the Global Leadership Summit, needed to move roughly 2,500 paying members off WooCommerce Subscriptions and onto MemberPress without interrupting a single recurring payment. MemberFix planned and ran the membership migration over four months, from kickoff in March to go-live on July 1, 2026.

🌐 GLOBAL LEADERSHIP NETWORK: https://www.globalleadership.org/

The Situation

Global Leadership Network (GLN) is the organization behind the Global Leadership Summit, a two-day leadership conference held August 6-7, 2026, with a goal of around 60,000 attendees across hundreds of physical host locations plus a large online audience.

The membership side of the business runs year-round. Members pay monthly or annually for a library of leadership development content. When GLN decided to rebuild its digital platform (new site, new content tiers, new video stack), WooCommerce Subscriptions, the tool that had run the membership billing for years, was being left behind. MemberPress and Stripe would take its place.

The Problem

The job, on paper, was a platform move. Three things made it challenging.

First, one constraint shaped the whole project. GLN's product owner Chris Zaugg set it early and repeated it throughout: no customer was going to re-enter their credit card. If monthly subscribers had to touch their billing, “the service engagement team will get crushed.”

Second, everyone remembered the last launch. The previous year, the new globalleadership.org went live on August 1, with the summit starting August 7. On the product side, “everything was broken,” said Jessica, a key member of the product team. The team manually fixed around 150 links in the six days before the summit. Nobody wanted a sequel. As Chris put it: “We know that nothing goes perfectly. We just don't want the whole thing to break like it did last year.”

Third, the WooCommerce system GLN was leaving had problems of its own. Jessica walked through them: a billing bug that for almost a year had been charging old yearly subscribers every month at their full rate, sticking the subscription in processing until she cleared it; one-year coupons that never flipped to a paid renewal, so she had to catch each one; members showing up twice in her reports. A fourth arrived in April, partway into the project, when the cancel button started cutting access on the spot – members who had paid for a full year lost it immediately. MemberFix's review also turned up close to 3,000 coupons, most expired.

Chris described where they had started:

The timing raised the stakes. Most of GLN's membership renewals land in August, alongside the summit. A botched migration would have hit their biggest revenue window of the year.

The Decision

At the March kickoff with MemberFix, one requirement came in with the client: no customer re-enters their card. The open questions were scope and mechanics: migrate only the ~2,800 active subscriptions, or everything including canceled records? Migrate passwords, or skip them?

The decisions GLN and MemberFix made together:

• Keep the existing Stripe account. Every customer's card already lived there as a payment token, and that is what made “no card re-entry” possible: each subscription was recreated via API against the stored token, with a trial period set to the member's real next renewal date. WooCommerce kept billing until go-live and MemberPress picked up from each member's next payment, so nobody was charged twice in the switchover window, and nobody was asked for their card again.
• Skip password migration entirely. Members would log in with magic links instead. No reset emails, no “forgot password” queue on day one.
• Import everything, including canceled subscriptions. The records cost little to carry, and GLN wanted the history for reporting and win-back purposes.
• Migrate active coupons only. The ~3,000-coupon pile was mostly expired clutter. Chris's ruling: if he ever asks to re-import expired coupons, the team has his permission to bring a straitjacket.
• Show members their real price. Long-time members on grandfathered rates would see their actual legacy price on their account page, not the current public price, with the discount carried as a Stripe coupon.

Chris set the constraints and the pricing model; MemberFix proposed the mechanics.

What the MemberPress Migration Involved

The build ran on a staging site for three months before anyone touched production. In business terms, here is what GLN got:

1. Billing recreated inside Stripe, not re-entered by customers. New subscriptions were built on the payment tokens already stored in GLN's Stripe account, each with a trial period set to the member's real next renewal date. Members kept paying on schedule. Nothing to do, nothing to re-enter.
2. Full payment history, not just current state. 7,800 transactions were imported into MemberPress, including refunds back to July 2023; canceled subscriptions were migrated as membership records as well, while canceled orders with no payment behind them were left out so as not to confuse members. The service team can now see a member's entire payment story on the account page instead of looking it up in Stripe.
3. Legacy pricing honored automatically. Stripe coupons carry each member's actual rate forward, so a member paying an old price keeps it through their next renewal year. The account page displays the real number.
4. A simpler tier structure. The old plans consolidated into a seat-based model – Share5, Share15, and ShareEnterprise, where the number is the seat count.
5. Magic-link login for everyone. No password database moved, no reset flow, one less support channel to staff at go-live.
6. A go-live built around data freshness. The final data export ran on migration day (June 26), a second pull on June 30 caught any orders and renewals that happened in between, and the site switched to its final domain on July 1. The import itself was configured so the host's time limits couldn't cut it off mid-run.

Alongside the build, Dejan helped Jessica's team with the new system: live walkthroughs of members, transactions, refunds and coupons across MemberPress and Stripe, plus recorded Loom videos to go back to.

Mid-project, when double charges started appearing on the live site, Dejan traced the cause by email before the weekly call: an unrelated Stripe payment plugin.

The Results

The migration ran on June 26 and the new platform went live July 1, 2026:

• ~2,500 active members migrated, zero credit cards re-entered
• 7,800 transactions and full subscription history visible in MemberPress
• The old system's clutter mostly stayed behind. Only active coupons migrated. Each member's tier was set from their most recent WooCommerce transaction, so members who had doubled up came across on a single membership. Canceled and pending-cancellation member migrated as records, keeping the access they had paid for with no renewal attached.
• On the post-project feedback call, Chris reported no membership or login issues he was aware of

One post-launch issue is worth mentioning. The two sides had different records of what had been agreed on legacy pricing for yearly members: GLN's communication to members said the old price would hold for everyone, and the project's meeting notes read differently. By the time the gap surfaced, 100+ yearly renewals had processed at the new price. Chris put it down to a miscommunication and Dejan handled it within a day: refunds for every member affected, coupons applied to their next renewal, and a refund-allocation spreadsheet for GLN's finance team, who were closing out July.

On the feedback call, Chris called it “very small in light of the whole thing.” The incident stayed small because it was caught before the August renewal wave.

The Takeaway

Migration risk concentrates in billing, not data. Moving records is the easy part. Interrupting 2,500 recurring payment relationships is where migrations lose customers and burn support teams. If your members' cards already live in a payment gateway you plan to keep, a migration never has to touch the customer's wallet.

Reviewed by Vic Dorfman, founder of MemberFix, a WordPress membership expert with 10+ years building, fixing, and scaling membership sites.