How to Accept Subscriptions/Recurring Payments with WooCommerce

WooCommerce Subscriptions allows you to add subscriptions capability to your physical and virtual products. You can create and manage products with recurring payments for monthly, weekly or yearly subscriptions, offer free trials or even add signup fees to capture more residual revenue from your store.

WooCommerce Subscriptions Features

Multiple Payment Gateways

Accept subscription/recurring payments with over 25 supported payment gateways.

Manual Subscription Payments

Manually rebill a payment through any payment gateway, along with automatic email invoices and receipts.

Advanced Automatic Rebilling

Automatically rebill a payment when a renewal fails to make sure that you never lose any revenue.

Free Trials & Signup Fees

screenshot showing how to configure a free trial for a subscription or add a signup fees in WooCommerce

Add a free trial to your subscription product, configure a renewal price and charge a one-time signup fee as setup cost.

Variable Subscriptions

screenshot showing how to select variable subscription as a product type in WooCommerce

Configure variable subscriptions in a product by allowing your customers to choose from multiple subscription options at checkout. With variable subscriptions, your customers can even choose their own billing schedule.

In order to create a variable subscription, you need to define some variations first (e.g. Billing Period – Week, Month and Year).

screenshot showing the billing period attribute of a variable subscription in WooCommerce

Now for each variation configure the subscription price and the billing period (e.g. Week – $15/week).

screenshot showing how to configure the billing period in a variable subscription in WooCommerce

Subscription Management

screenshot showing how to manage a subscription in WooCommerce

Store owners can check the status of a subscription in the WooCommerce Subscription management menu (WooCommerce > Edit Subscription). They can also suspend, cancel or modify a subscription such as add shipping, fees, taxes, change the renewal price etc.

Subscriber Account Management

screenshot showing the account management option for a subscriber in WooCommerce

Customers/Subscribers can also manage their own subscriptions from account dashboard. They just need to go to  My Account > View Subscription page to suspend/cancel a subscription, update their payment method, address, upgrade/downgrade a subscription etc.

Synchronised Payments

screenshot showing the subscription payment synchronisation option in WooCommerce

WooCommerce subscriptions allows you to synchronize the renewal payments of all of your customers. This is useful when you only want to ship on certain days of the month or align your customers to the same membership term. You can even prorate the first payment of a synchronized subscription purchase.

Upgrades/Downgrades

screenshot showing how to switch between a customer upgrade or downgrade in a WooCommerce subscription

Allow customers to switch between subscription variations (e.g. upgrade, downgrade or cross-grade). With flexible proration options, you can also customize the costs of switching to a new subscription product to suit the needs of your store.

Flexible Product Options

screenshot showing the main flexible product options in a WooCommerce subscription

WooCommerce subscriptions is flexible. You can make a product downloadable, virtual or physical and charge renewal payments on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. There are also options to limit a subscription product to one-per-customer and charge shipping only on the initial order.

Multiple Subscriptions

screenshot showing how a customer can purchase multiple subscriptions at WooCommerce checkout

Allow customers to purchase multiple subscription products in the same transaction. This will automatically group the subscription products to reduce the payment gateway fees and logistical overhead for their future renewals.

Subscription Coupons

screenshot showing how a coupon can be configured for a WooCommerce subscription

Add coupon/discount functionality to your subscriptions. For example, a discount on a customer’s monthly payment/signup fee.

Customer Emails

screenshot showing a subscription renewal email sent by WooCommerce

Automatically notify a customer when a subscription is successfully renewed, canceled or expire.

How to Enable WooCommerce Subscriptions

  • Download the WooCommerce Subscription add-on from this affiliate link: https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/?aff=2057.
  • Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin from your WordPress dashboard.
  • Click Choose file and select the zip copy of the plugin from your computer.
  • Click Install Now and Activate.

Capture More Revenue

After you have installed WooCommerce Subscriptions you can start configuring your subscription products to charge your customers every month or bill them for an in-person service provided by your small business.

You can now easily see how many active subscribers you have, when they are being billed, and how much revenue you are generating from your store.

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