Woo Subscriptions is one of my favorite extensions for WooCommerce. The developer behind it is a friend of mine, Brent Shepherd over at Prospress. I have used it multiple times on past membership sites as setting monthly payments for my coaching packages. In the past, when I did membership sites using WooCommerce I would bundle this one with Groups for WooCommerce. But as of lately, the new WooCommerce Memberships extension works seamlessly with Woo Subscriptions. So if you are looking at doing a membership site, I recommend that combo.
The Subscriptions Settings
Once you have installed the extension, you will now have a tab under your WooCommerce settings specifically for this extension.
Button Text
A simple but very useful option. This is not only good because it gives you an option to customize the text in these buttons, but also if you have other products on your site, you can make your call-to-action with subscriptions stand out.
Roles
Again, this gives you the chance to assign subscribers to a specific role. Where I might use this is if I have several different subscriber-like roles. Let’s say I allow subscribers to my blog and as a result they end up with a profile on my site. Then I also have the customer role for clients who purchase my coaching. I might then use a plugin like the User Role Editor to create custom user roles for my subscribers and call it subscriptions. That way I can more easily organize all the users I have on my site.
And of course I can do the same for inactive subscriber roles.
Renewals
This is where the benefits of this plugin are and the recurring payments. By default, most store owners won’t want the manual option compared to the auto-renewal. Giving your customers the need to go in and renew manual will likely end up with more people canceling their subscriptions. So unless you do have a specific reason to use this option, it’s there. Just remember that if they are auto-recurring, make that obvious to people before they subscriber or you will have nothing but headaches down the road.
Switching
Another great option is if you have different variations of subscriptions where customers can either upgrade or downgrade. In these settings you can easily allow people to switch to another subscription, hopefully upgrading to the next level. You can allow them to switch between Subscription Variations, Grouped Subscriptions, or both. A prorated sign-up fee is optional and you can control the subscription length on prorated switching. And lastly, the option to also change the button text for switching between subscriptions.
Sychronisation
This is a useful feature if you want subscriptions to renew on specific days.
Miscellaneous
A few odds and ends here that are pretty self-explanatory.
Payment Gateways
Once you have activated and set up your payment gateways, they will appear here. Note, if you are using PayPal as one of your gateways, PayPal Standard is the only one that works with this extension.
Subscription Coupons
You will also be able to take advantage of coupons that come with WooCommerce. As you can see here, the option for either a flat or percentage discount on both sign-ups and recurring fees.
Email Notices
Under your WooCommerce Settings > Emails you will find several different emails that are related to the subscription extension.
Setting Up a Product Subscription
With subscriptions, you have the option of Simple Subscription and Variable Subscription
Simple Subscription
As you can see there are several options here for how you can control your subscription price. The drop down menu gives you several variables for the number of days, weeks, months or years. Sign-up fee is optional if different than the subscription fee and setting a free trial or a sale price is easy to do.
Variable Subscriptions
These are very similar to setting up other variable products, which you are either familiar with having used WooCommerce, or you can learn more about here. But as you can see here some fields are unique to subscriptions.
Advanced
In the Advanced tab you will find one specific setting for subscriptions that will let you allow a single customer to have limits.
Managing Your Subscriptions
As people sign up you will be able to manage all of those subscriptions. You get a convenient birds-eye view of the subscription as well as the option to suspend or cancel one. You can even change the Next Payment date if needed.
Extend Your WooCommerce Subscriptions
You may need to give your customers more options such as:
- Skip Next Shipment
- Ship Now
- Change Next Payment Date
- Change Frequency
- Edit Existing Subscription
- Add Products to Existing Subscription
- Edit Product Quantities in Existing Subscriptions
Instead of messing with your code, their is an extension that will do the trick for you call Toolbox For WooCommerce Subscriptions.
So if you need to set up recurring payments with WooCommerce, this is the option I recommend. As you can see it has a lot of features and easily lets you control subscriptions. Learn more by clicking here.
Thanks for a comprehensive review Bob! This will be a great resource to send to folks looking for an overview of (almost) all the features. 🙂
You are welcome and thanks… in fact, I will update it when your newest update comes out and also if you ever want to ping me on any other Important details I may have overlooked, happy to add them in as well…. cheers!
This is helpful Bob. I’m always interested in your take on plugins. If you give something the thumbs-up I know most users will be able to make it work.
Hey Sheryl, thanks… hoping to try to do one of these a week as there are so many good one’s out there 🙂
Does this plugin allow for users to name their own price? Failing that, is it compatible with the Name Your price plugin?
Hey Scott,
It doesn’t allow for users to name their own price, but it is compatible with Name Your Price plugin. A little more info in the docs here: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/name-your-price/#section-5
Brent
Brent, thanks for coming in and clarifying… cheers!
Trying to figure out how to handle 2-year or 3-year subscriptions. Do you just do a signup fee 100% with $0 in the subscription amount with a subscription length of that 2 year or 3 year?
Hi Jason,
It depends on what you want. If you want a subscription that renews annual (i.e. creates a renewal order in your store and emails the customer of the renewal) but is paid up-front, then you want a subscription price with 100% sign-up fee and $0 recurring amount. FAQ for that here: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/subscriptions/faq/#section-40
If you want a subscription that lasts a total of 2 or 3 years, but doesn’t need to renew because you don’t need to ship anything of have a renewal order, you can just create a product with the length equal to the billing interval. For example, this price setup https://cloudup.com/cvnG_xuOig1 will display like to this to the customer as “$100.00 for 2 years”.
If you need more help, please submit a support ticket: https://www.woothemes.com/my-account/create-a-ticket/
Brent
Does paypal standard subscription works on multiple websites..?
Hi Bob, can you tell me if this plugin allows for suspension of subscription for a defined duration i.e. for 1 week or 2 week or as per user defined, is that feature available in plugin or that needs to be customized, as there is suspension feature already but it does not let user defined upto how much time they will become unsubscibe, plz let me know if this is already there ?
Yes, you can limit the number of suspensions, but I don’t see where you can limit the time length since it’s all driven, pause and un-pause from the customer. Of course you can do it manually yourself, but that would be very time-consuming. Let me check a bit deeper into that to give you a definitive yes or no, but thinking no.
sorry, i think you’re getting it wrong.
I mean to say that if a customer buys a subscription product X for 12 Weeks and then in 4th week of their subscription they want to cancel it for coming 2 weeks(may be going on vacation), so is that can be done ?
In plugin, we have option for cancel subscription and again re-activate it, thats working fine, i need that customer can set no. of weeks (options will be 1-12 weeks) so upto that duration subscription becomes “On-hold” status, is this achievable ?
Thanks !!
Okay, so here is what the customer can do. Eg. if their subscription is for 12 weeks, then you can set how many times they can pause their subscription during that period. Then they have the option of when to pause and when to activate again.
Hi Bob,
thanks for the review!
Do you know if it’s possible to force manual payments with a payment gateway that supports recurring payments? E.g. manual payments through paypal.
Thanks!
Hey Tom, I think I know what you mean. And with the recent update of this extension, it has a lot more functionality than when I did this review. But since I haven’t done this myself, I will need to pop in and double check.
Do you have any good examples of sites using Subscriptions? Trying to implement it on my own right now, but want to see some comparisons. Thanks in advance!
Myself, I don’t have those, as I cannot keep track of who is using it or not 🙂 But with our membership launch Jan. 1, we will be using it here. In fact, I have used it personally several times in the past.
Dear Bob,
I created a pretty complex site (gross [dot] yourfilternow [dot] com) using WooSubscriptions – selling furnace filters at recurring intervals (using WooSubs), choice of delaying its shipment (by using free trial periods), & also giving the customer the ability to purchase an item as a one-off (created via WooCommerce’s “simple product”).
My question is if a simple product & a subscription product (that has a free trial period) are bought together, should the store manager “complete” that order right away? This would initiate the payment for the one-off purchase but then the subscription product wouldn’t take effect until the free trial ends? I can’t seem to get a straight answer on this. I have contacted WooSupport but haven’t heard back yet.
Interested to get your thoughts – thanks!
-CT
So I have products already in woo commerce.. Is there a way where the plugin becomes active or a variable option on my existing products?
For example. I sell donuts. I have all my donuts listed on my website as products. Now, I want to create a recurring purchase for my customer through subsciptions. I dont’ want to create two products one for regular orders and one for subscriptions. Is there a solutions?
My initial thought is yes, you will need to create two products.
Hi Anthony, Bob is right. Subscriptions doesn’t provide a way to add subscription options onto a non-subscription product. However, we do have a free, experimental extension publicly available that you can use to get exactly that. You can find that extension and some more information about it here: https://github.com/Prospress/woocommerce-subscribe-to-all-the-things
I really like the sound of this experimental plugin and think it does what we want. I’m not used to working with Github files though and the whole site is very confusing. Is there a download for the entire files in a zip?
I don’t see how to easily download all the files.
Thanks,
Dale.
Hi Dale,
You can download a zip of the each version of the plugin from here: https://github.com/Prospress/woocommerce-subscribe-all-the-things/releases
The direct link for the latest version at the time of this comment (version 1.0.3) is this one: https://github.com/Prospress/woocommerce-subscribe-all-the-things/archive/v1.0.3.zip (but that will change in future)
We plan to get it published on WordPress eventually to help make it easier to install/activate. Sorry for the trouble now. 🙂
Anthony,
I learned this the hard way…after months of creating our site & working with WooSubscriptions, the way you described is the only way to do it.
We have only subscription products showing when you view our site (gross [dot] yourfilternow [dot} com) & on each of those products, we have a button that takes you to the “regular” version of that product.
So my thought is you would want to do the opposite of what we did in the link above. Show your regular products & then have a button on each of those to their respective WooSubscriptions recurring product.
I’ve been working heavily with WooSubscriptions for the past year. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an email at contact [at] ctkaupp [dot] com & I’d be glad to help.
-CT
Hi CT, it sounds like we got it out too late for your needs, but take a look at the free, experimental mini-extension for this here: https://github.com/Prospress/woocommerce-subscribe-to-all-the-things
The concept for it is to provide subscription options to other product types. This was mainly to make it possible to subscribe to Product Bundles, Product Composites and other complex product types. But it does have the added advantage of being able to offer subscription options for simple or variable products as well.
Hi Bob and Brent, thanks for this post, and for letting us know about the new extension in the comments. I had a question related to the Mixed Checkout feature:
We’re trying to set up a WooCommerce integration in an environment where a product purchase (eg: a t-shirt) and a donation can be put into the same shopping cart. WooCommerce makes that part very simple, and if the donation is a single payment gift, everything is working great.
Ideally, we want to allow the donation to be recurring and purchased in the same shopping cart as the product. Obviously, I don’t want a t-shirt every month but I would like to donate $10 per month. With WooCommerce we can indicate that the $10/month is recurring, but my question is how to get this information on a per-product level to C&P? Is that possible in any way?
Is this what Mix Market will accomplish?
HI Gaspar, trying to think this one through.. but Brent might have a better suggestion.
I’m not familiar with Mix Market, but if that allows combo products with WC it’s a possibility, You might contact them pre-sales.
I had thought of the add-on, but that doesn’t make sense for the t-shirt. Will have to think on this a bit more.
Hi Bob, thanks for your quick response. I mistyped on the Mixed Market bit.
I meant Mixed Content. It’s easy on the Woocommerce bit to have a Mixed Content cart with two products (one subscription, one simple, for example), but the issue is getting that information through to Click&Pledge as two separate products. Any advice would be great! Thanks.
Ahh, I see. I’ve never used Click&Pledge so not sure how it all integrates. And not sure if they would have some thoughts or Woo.
Can this extension provide the functionality of a customer selecting an automatic shipment or order of the product at a selected frequency?
Something like this: http://www.restockit.com/solo-inc-l12bln-translucent-plastic-bubble-lid-fits-r10nnj-num-sccl12bln.html
If not, is there a plugin out there for Woocommerce that can provide this functionality?
Since a lot of sites do use this for sending our product subscriptions I would tend to say yes. Of course depending on the complexity of your shipping and to make it a custom frequency may require another plugin. I know if you select a product as a simple subscription and looking under the shipping, you will find this.
Bob,
We offer enrollment into our school. Our students have the option to pay once for the full year (1x $1000), twice for semesters (2x $550), or 9 monthly installments (9x $125). I have created a product page that uses a gravity form for enrollment data and payment plan selection. Works great but we then process the recurring payments manually. What a pain. However, I can’t figure out how to now utilize subscriptions and Gravity forms add-on to make that work. HELP please.
We do a similar thing but use one page checkout plugin to create the payment / checkout / selection page all in one.
Bob also has an article about another one page plugin that can’t recall the name of.
But if you are going to get a new plugin then hurry because Woocommerce has a 1 day 50% discount sale on at moment – Bob has the coupon in his Twitter feed I believe.
Dale – https://mydisabilitymatters.com.au
Hey Michael, so the form is on your product page but a separate GF form. If that’s the case, no way to tie it into a subscription product. But if you use Gravity Forms product add-on, that should work. Or am I not clear on this?
This is a nice article and something we are looking for. Do you know if this will work with a paymentwall gateway? It is not listed. Is there a way to hook the two together?
Depends on the gateway and if they allow recurring payments. Here is a list of all that work with this extension as well as the gateway extensions.
I think this extension is very useful to Virtual product such as Domain & Hosting Seller.
Thank you Bob for passing the word. I have been trying to set up a recurreing payment for days on my website. Now I can start selling again. Thank you.
Hello,
I have a presale question. I am looking to have a subscription based site, I want to charge $29.99 for a monthly subscription. But when I launch the site I want to have an introductory special and only charge users $19.99 per month for the FIRST 3 months only. This means that on the 4th month the user is charged $29.99 instead of $19.99…is that possible?
Since this isn’t my plugin you might want to send WooComnerce a pre-sales question 🙂
Hi Cory,
See what WooCommerce support says as to whether it can be done easily as I’m not sure.
However it can certainly be hacked and it is similar to what we have done for a different situation. You can get another one of their plugins that does either bundles or forced sales to push 2 subscriptions into the one package. Have 1 subscription that just goes for 3 months at your intro price and another subscription at the higher price that only starts in 4 months time.
Dale.
Dale Reardon Founder, My Disability Matters The new social network for the Disability Community Friends, family, carers and businesses welcome
Phone: 03 6286 7305 | 0420 277 457 | Skype: dale.reardon Twitter: @audisability | Linkedin | Facebook
Amazing points 🙂