If you have a WooCommerce store, subscriptions is a must-have strategy to get useful information about prospects. With a subscription website on WooCommerce, you can eventually increase conversion rates and go for bigger sales.
Subscriptions can help you sell products or any service and invite people to get regular updates and releases. Four out of five online store owners have subscriptions enabled on their sites. How does the process get easier for a large number of shop owners?
Let us introduce WooCommerce Subscriptions. It is developed by the WooCommerce team to make products and services easily available for subscription.
Today, we will learn everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions (features, pros and cons, resources) and why you should give it a go (if you haven’t yet).
Why Subscriptions Are Important for WooCommerce
Before we learn everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions, we recommend you know the value of subscriptions for WooCommerce. Give it a look below:
Get Engaging Customers
Subscription doesn’t come free! With a subscription scheme, you get valuable customer information – emails, name, location, interest, etc. In return, you are also offering them regular updates, newsletters, downloadable files, discounts, or anything you want to engage them with for a long time.
With good content, your prospects will continue to grow interested in your brand and gradually become recurring customers to tell others about your service/ product.
Recurring Revenue
The ultimate goal of the subscription model is to engage prospects and earn their confidence throughout the process. With regular updates and news from your side, you can easily promote new products or any extension to service. Sooner or later, they will visit the landing page and make sales. With this, you can have recurring income, actively contributing to your business growth.
Sell More
People who subscribe to your products/services already believe in your brand. They believe they will receive useful and informative content in exchange for their Subscription. You can easily use this opportunity to promote your recommended products or cross-sell related products to them. This will bring you effective results and make you make extra income.
Have Better Control
With subscriptions, you can keep track of possible buyers. Subscribers are people who are interested in your service and can convert with the right opportunity. With this, you can predict the conversion number. Having better concepts means having better control over your business; thus, you can plan more effective strategies.
Increase Subscribers’ Value
Not only to grow and build a community, but with subscriptions, you can also limit your product/ service access. Keep outsiders away, and make your exclusive/ premium content available to subscribed members only. This will also add value to your subscription policy, and subscribers will feel special when they learn that only they have access to this content.
Learn More: Six Best WooCommerce Subscription Essentials for Your Store
WooCommerce Subscriptions: Key Features
For any subscription website, the goal is to convert more visitors into becoming subscribers and loyal to your brand. With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can provide an easy subscription policy for prospects. Learn how
Residual Revenue With Recurring Payments
WooCommerce Subscriptions helps you to track residual revenue with Subscription based products. With a regular store system, it is impossible to know how much money you will make in a month.
But with subscriptions enabled, you know how many people are interested in buying your products. Subscriptions also lead the way to creating and organizing products with recurring payments, such as product-of-the-month clubs, weekly service subscriptions, or even yearly software billing packages. Thus, having a system that can capture more residual revenue!
Variable Subscriptions
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can also have subscriptions for variable and simple products. Get your subscribers to select a proper subscription plan that suits their requirements and refine the subscription strategy. Also, using WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can allow your customers to have their billing schedule.
Free Trials and Sign Up
To convince people to subscribe to your products, you need to leverage them with something. You can offer them a free trial of your product or service and offer them to test a demo. Often people will get more interested in your service after taking a live taste of it!
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can allow your customers to try before buying. That’s not all! Charge them a small amount for their setup costs. With a standard configuration, you manage the free trial period and create sign-up fees based on it.
Multiple Subscriptions
Ensure flexibility where your customers can buy different subscription plans simultaneously with the same transaction. They can be part of other subscription plans that are organized and well-managed.
Once someone has subscribed to several subscription plans, WooCommerce Subscriptions will group the products. This will help to reduce the gateway fees and logistical overhead for their upcoming renewals. Learn more about multiple subscriptions here.
Manage Subscriptions
Control subscription plans and accounts as you like. With WooCommerce Subscriptions, store owners can manage everything about subscriptions with a full-featured subscription management dashboard. Go to WooCommerce> Edit Subscription. From here, you can expire or cancel a subscription and modify the trial expiration, add items, shipping, fees, or taxes to the Subscription, or control the recurring total for future payments.
Synchronized Payments
With the WooCommerce renewal synchronization feature, you can ship subscription plans on certain days of the month. For example, if someone subscribes to your site on 1st February for a monthly subscription, they have to pay for the service on 1st February. On 1st March, their Subscription will auto renew based on payment, which will go on. Learn more about synchronized renewal here.
In fact, you prorate the first payment of any renewal subscription purchase. With this feature, you can charge your customers based on days.
Prorating the first payment is a flexible payment option for customers. Here, you can charge your customers a fair amount based on the days left of the current billing period.
Subscribers’ View
People who subscribe to your platform can also manage their accounts and subscription plans using a dashboard. Each subscriber gets a “My Account” page upon Subscription. From there, they can go to “View Subscription,” suspend or cancel a subscription, change the shipping address or payment method for future renewals and upgrade or downgrade their Subscription. Follow the official docs here to learn more about the process.
Upgrade/ Downgrade Subscriptions
To be able to upgrade or downgrade between subscription products adds value for customers. This option allows them to easily switch between different subscription products with adjusted proration payments.
WooCommerce Subscriptions will never prorate recurring payments automatically. Meaning subscribers can switch between different subscription plans without having to pay (until the next payment date).
For example, suppose someone had a subscription plan to a two products/year product on 1st January. When the subscriber switches to a four products/year subscription, his next renewal payment is charged on 1st February.
Subscription Coupons
We all love offers and discounts! You can reduce the abandonment rate with attractive offers with your Subscription. With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can include a discount on their monthly/ yearly renewal plans. There are a lot of options to improvise! You can also reduce the sign-up fee for newcomers or make irresistible offers when they subscribe initially.
WooCommerce Subscriptions covers both recurring discount coupons and sign-up fee coupons. You can offer them in percentage. Also, learn more about coupons and discounts here.
Flexible Product Options
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, don’t hesitate to offer flexible product options. ]With subscription products, you can provide customers with downloadable, virtual or physical products. You can also modify weekly renewal payments (available monthly and annually), restrict products to one/customer, or charge shipping charges only for their first order.
There are endless opportunities for store owners to play with the product options. By this, they can also ensure a flexible shop system for everybody and push sales.
Subscription Emails
Use subscription emails with WooCommerce Subscriptions. To create a powerful business framework, first, you must ensure transparent communication between your service and customers. It just got easier with WooCommerce Subscriptions.
With Subscription emails, you can automatically remind customers of subscription renewal payments and cancellation of subscription plans and notify them when their subscription plans have expired. WooCommerce Subscriptions has set up a number of built-in emails for different scenarios. Take a look at the subscription emails here.
Pros and Cons of WooCommerce Subscriptions
Every tool has benefits followed by some drawbacks. In this part, we will learn the pros and cons of WooCommerce Subscriptions. Let’s start with the pros first.
| Pros |
|---|
| Captures residual revenue with recurring payments |
| Over 25 payment gateways for auto-recurring payments |
| Manual recurring payments are available |
| Auto rebilling on failed subscription payments |
| Subscribers can upgrade/ downgrade their subscription plans |
| Sends auto-emails |
| Detailed reports on recurring revenue, number of active subscribers, and more |
| Variable/ multiple subscriptions available |
| Flexible product options |
| Built-in subscription emails |
| Recurring discount coupons and sign-up fee coupons |
Although WooCommerce Subscriptions is a compact plugin, customers have reported several issues. They are:
| Cons |
|---|
| Can have better synchronization with ActiveCampaign |
| Credit card update is not available |
| WooCommerce-based only |
Support From WooCommerce Team
WooCommerce, the largest eCommerce plugin for WordPress, has developed WooCommerce Subscriptions. It can easily integrate with WooCommerce and powers up your eCommerce store with profitable subscription features. Hence, with WooCommerce Subscriptions, you get the power and flexibility of WooCommerce.
Besides, you are getting WooCommerce Subscriptions at a very affordable rate. It will cost you only $199/annually. Within the first year, you are also receiving exclusive 1-year extension updates. Plus, don’t get taken by the annual purchase plan. In case WooCommerce Subscriptions is different from the one you have been looking for, you have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Be sure to take support from them when needed. With this purchase, you also get 1-year support from the team, including product installation help, configuration support, and operational support. To guide you, you have official docs for every step.
WooCommerce Subscriptions is used worldwide. It can easily be used with Amazon Pay, AutomateWoo, Braintree, Groups for WooCommerce, PayPal Payments, Sensei Pro (WC Paid Courses), Square for WooCommerce, Stripe, WooCommerce API Manager, WooCommerce Payments, WooCommerce Memberships.
Is WooCommerce Subscriptions a good catch for you? If you want to integrate the resilience of WooCommerce with a subscription plugin for your WooCommerce Store, this extension is a handsome pick for you.
Final Words
WooCommerce Subscriptions is a familiar name among subscription plugins. It is easy to learn and use and comes with a variety of features to monetize your Woo store.
However, there are still some works to do. And the WooCommerce team is constantly improving the plugin with new features and updates. For a WooCommerce user who wants a budget-friendly subscription plugin loaded with useful features and backed with powerful support, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the right one for you!
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