Subscriptions

The cost to get a new customer (acquisition cost) is pretty high. Many e-commerce stores only make a tiny profit on the first transaction because you often spend money attracting that customer with ads, tradeshows, and so on. That's why lots of store owners love recurring payments, where customers pay every week, month, or year.

WooCommerce Subscriptions (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/) is one of the most powerful subscription products on the market with all sorts of advanced features, such as the following:

• Pausing subscriptions
• Prorating subscriptions
• Synchronized payments

Creating a subscription product

To create a subscription product, you first have to purchase and install the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension. Once you do, you'll see a new option on the edit product page.

Select Simple subscription although you can also choose Variable subscription, which is very similar to variable products. When you select a subscription product, you'll see new fields:

As you can see, there are a ton of options. You can select the following:

• How often you want to bill people (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, yearly, twice annually, and so on)
• When the subscription should expire—if ever
• Whether there's a free trial or conversely whether there's a signup fee
• Of course, a price

When you take a look at the frontend, the interface has totally changed to show all of our options to the visitor:

Let's see how to add a recurring payment option for the users in the following section.

Adding a recurring payment option to a product

If you've been to Amazon.com or other big online retailers, they will often offer a "subscribe and save" option for one-off purchases.

This lets users buy a product one time or if it is something they buy regularly, they can subscribe and save some money—and the retailer has consistent sales coming in.

And you can do this with your WooCommerce store with All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions (https://woocommerce.com/products/all-products-for-woocommerce-subscriptions/), which is another paid extension by WooCommerce. You can turn any product into a subscription, as shown in the following screenshot:

Let's get started with subscription settings in the following section.

Subscription settings

Subscriptions are complex and have their own settings page. Under WooCommerce | Settings | Subscriptions, you can find a ton of settings.

Manual versus automatic renewals

If you live in the US, Canada, or Europe, you should have access to modern gateways that save credit card numbers for you and give you a token so you can charge credit cards.

WooCommerce has a list of subscription compatible gateways on their site, here is the link if you want to take a quick look: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/subscriptions/payment-gateways/

That's all subscriptions need to automatically charge someone's card. But if you live outside of those areas, or if you are having a hard time finding the right payment gateway, you might not be able to get credit card tokens and bill someone on a recurring basis automatically. In that case, there's a feature called Manual Renewals that you can enable:

Users who have manual renewals will receive an email and will have to click a link and pay for an order every month. It's much more work for the end-user and is only designed for stores that can't get access to modern payment gateways.

If you have a modern gateway, there's a very good chance you don't want to turn on this feature.

Subscription switching

If you have a bunch of related subscriptions, you might want to enable subscription switching. For example, let's say every month, you deliver a 24-pack of soda. If the subscriber starts to overflow with soda rather than cancel, give them a smaller soda pack and a smaller discount so they stay subscribed and can upgrade in future months:

I'm a big fan of enabling subscription switching between variations, but you can also enable them between a group of subscription products.

Synchronization

Some subscription stores do everything on a schedule. As an example, I subscribe to The Simple Jar. They deliver food weekly on a Monday.

They get all orders on Thursday, prep them on Sunday, and deliver on Monday morning. For businesses like this, for example, monthly loot boxes, that have a particular schedule, synchronizing subscriptions is hugely helpful. Customers can subscribe whenever and they'll get the next shipment and their payment will be postponed until the next billing cycle.

Check the Align Subscription Renewal Day checkbox and then follow the instructions under Learn More to enable this feature.

Retrying failed payments

Lastly, there's one other feature that's worth mentioning. Credit card numbers change and payments fail. Subscriptions have a feature that (under some conditions) will retry failed payments (https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/subscriptions/failed-payment-retry/). This gives credit cardholders time to pay off their balance.

Once you start getting the occasionally failed payment, ask your audience if this is something they'd want, and if so, you can enable it in your settings:

These are some of the settings every store owner and manager needs to know for WooCommerce. You should be able to create most product types and do so in such a way that customers are excited to see and purchase your product.