Offering subscriptions in your online store is a great way to generate recurring and predictable revenue. Depending on the type of products you sell, the subscription offer may look a little different between different e-commerce merchants. Some offer a “secret box” subscription where the content may vary each month, some offer specific product subscriptions while others offer memberships or access to digital products on a subscription basis.
No matter what type of subscription you want to offer in your WooCommerce store, you need two things to get started:
WooCommerce does not handle subscriptions out of the box. This needs to be solved via a separate plugin. There are several different providers but the most common is WooCommerce Subscriptions. We at Krokedil think this plugin works best and therefore we have chosen to create support for it in all our integrations that offer subscriptions. You can buy WooCommerce Subscriptions on the marketplace for extensions available at woocommerce.com.
Once you have installed and configured WooCommerce Subscriptions, you also need an agreement with a payment provider that supports recurring payments. In addition, you need a plugin that makes the communication between WooCommerce and the payment provider work properly. On our Products page you can filter the list and sort it to show all our plugins that support subscription payments.
There are a number of providers that support recurring payments. Which one you choose is a decision you need to make based on the needs you have. Things that can affect your choice are:
Without going too much in depth, we have hopefully given you so much information that you know which payment provider you should look into, or at least which ones you have to choose from among those that best cover your needs.
How then does the logic around subscriptions work and what steps does a recurring payment contain? One thing to start with – even though you have an agreement with a payment provider about subscriptions, it is not with the payment provider that the logic for the next payment is handled. This is done in WooCommerce Subscriptions.
If we take a closer look at the different steps in a subscription’s life cycle, it looks like this:
Assuming nothing unexpected happens, this will continue until the customer chooses to cancel their subscription. Sometimes, however, errors can occur …
In theory, all future renewal payments for your subscriptions will work as they should. In practice, it looks a little different. The payment provider can refuse a renewed payment for many different reasons, but the most common is probably a subscription linked to a payment card where the card is too old. Other reasons may be that there are not sufficient funds on the account, invoice payments where the customer does not pass a credit check or technical problems in communication with the payment provider.
To reduce the risk of subscriptions being deactivated due to denied renewal payments, there is the option to activate the Retry Failed Payments feature in the WooCommerce Subscriptions settings. By activating this setting, WooCommerce Subscriptions will make new attempts to deduct the amount and notify the customer of the problems according to a customizable schedule. By default, it looks like this:
If even the fifth attempt fails, the renewal order is set to Failed and the customer is sent the email Customer Renewal Invoice (if it is activated) according to the normal failed renewal payment process.
Hopefully, a subscription will not have to go through all the steps above, but the problem with an expired card or too little money in the linked account will be fixed by the customer.
Should there be other, more technical, problems, there is always our knowledge database at docs.krokedil.com and in the next step our support team if the solution to your problem appears to be missing from our documentation.
Good luck getting started with subscriptions so you can make your already satisfied and happy customers even happier.
