One of the great advantages of WooCommerce is the ability to add subscriptions. Subscriptions are a popular tactic for increasing sales and maintaining the overall sales figures. WooCommerce doesn’t manage subscriptions out of the box. But you can add WooCommerce subscriptions features easily by adding an extension.

You can create WooCommerce subscriptions in several ways. In this guide, I am going to discuss how you can take advantage of WooCommerce subscriptions by using the best subscription plugins.

What is WooCommerce Subscription?

WooCommerce subscription is a great way of generating recurring sales from your potential customers. Similarly, subscriptions are an important choice for setting up the recurring bills for digital products sold at membership sites.

Subscriptions are also valid sales options for recurring billing for physical products. A popular business model where you send your customers a box at fixed intervals. In these models, the customers generally buy subscriptions that get renewed before expiration.

Why You Need WooCommerce Subscriptions

As I already mentioned, subscriptions allow you to automatically bill for recurring payments based on a schedule. Recurring payments provide a consistent and scheduled income from your current customers. You can have weekly, monthly, and yearly subscriptions for many types of products including virtual, physical, downloadable, and online services. WooCommerce makes these easy to set up and manage.

You can charge for an ongoing service like access to digital downloads, access to subscriber-only content, monthly magazines, reviews, videos, audio, courses, tutorials, podcasts, Netflix and Hulu services, etc. You can even charge weekly payment plans for onsite services like garden care, babysitting, pet care, etc.

Subscriptions are a great business model for WordPress-related products. For example, you can sell themes and plugins, or support for those. You can also sell a monthly service like hosting or a website maintenance plan.

Why You Need a WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugin

It’s possible to handle subscriptions manually. By charging your customers every week, month, quarter, year, etc., but there is a lot of works that go into the subscription.

Access: You must have an easy method of knowing who has access to what when that access will expire, and how much access they want to purchase. You should have an easy way for them to make changes to their subscriptions. Then, you have to provide access.

Billing: You have to send each person an email reminding them that you’re going to charge their account. If their credit card expires you have to contact them yourself. To cancel their subscription they have to contact you directly and then you have to decide when to stop their subscription and how to bill them.

Handling accounts: Imagine if your number of subscribers multiplied. You might be so busy handling their accounts that you couldn’t do any other work in the business itself. WooCommerce subscriptions plugins automate all of these problems.

Best WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugins

I will now mention some best WooCommerce subscriptions plugins that will help you set up and automate recurring sales-focused subscriptions at your stores.

1. WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions is the standard subscription plugin for WooCommerce. It’s an official WooCommerce product. The plugin supports manual updates with automatic email invoices and receipts for any of the payment gateways.

Features

• It includes multiple billing schedules
• Integrates with over 25 payment gateways
• It includes renewal notifications and performs rebilling for failed payments
• Give subscribers the ability to manage their own plans
• Create and manage subscription products at your WooCommerce store
• Set up subscription expiry dates

Price: starts at $199.

2. Subscriptions for WooCommerce

Subscriptions for WooCommerce by webtoffee is another great plugin that you can use for setting up and managing recurring payments and billing. The plugin helps you to create a subscription plan for your products. It is a paid plugin but you can try the plugin for free before buying the full license.

Features

• Allow subscriptions for physical or digital (downloadable) products
• Multiple billing schedules,
• Free trial & signup
• Recurring subscription discount coupon & email notifications
• Synchronize the dates of the subscription products to a specific day of the month
• Support multiple payments gateways

Price: starts at $89.

3. YITH WooCommerce Subscription

YITH WooCommerce subscription is a premium plugin that simplifies the process of offering subscriptions to your customers. This is an excellent plugin for creating subscriptions for videos, podcasts, courses, reviews, etc. All these you can offer to your customers on an installment basis.

Features

• Allows users to get subscription information on the “My Account” page
• You can create subscriptions for physical and virtual products
• Support PayPal, and Stripe for automatic payments
• Upgrade or downgrade subscription plans available (this option is only available for virtual products).

Price: starts at € 129,99.

4. Subscriptio

Subscriptio is another premium WooCommerce subscription plugin. It is a great option for selling products like online memberships, e-learning bundles, magazine subscriptions, and similar products.

Features

• Create subscription lists and management tools for customers
• Sell online memberships with recurring costs
• Configure subscription trial period
• Support Stripe and PayPal

Price: starts at $69.

5. SUMO Subscriptions

SUMO Subscriptions is a complete subscription solution for your WooCommerce store. It allows you to set up simple, variable, and grouped product subscriptions. Moreover, you can create and sell subscription products from your existing WooCommerce store.

Features

• Compatible with WooCommerce and WordPress updates
• Excellent support with fast response time
• Support payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, etc
• Create multiple subscriptions in a single checkout
• Support SUMO Reward Points and WPML

Price: Start at $49.

Frequently Ask Questions

Q: How much do WooCommerce subscriptions cost?

A: Some top plugins have a free version but if you need the advanced features you have to go with the premium plugin. The starting price of the premium plugins is usually around € 129.99.

Q: Can WooCommerce do subscriptions?

A: Yes. WooCommerce does subscriptions but you need to install a separate subscription plugin to get the features.

Q: Does WooCommerce and subscriptions plugin are free to use?

A: WooCommerce eCommerce plugin is absolutely free to use but for the subscription, you have both free and paid options. For advanced features, you have to use the paid version.

Final Thoughts

Subscriptions are a great way to increase revenue from your WooCommerce store. The WooCommerce plugins on this list make it easy to set up. With subscription plugin you can use your revenue more comfortably in building the business. Moreover, the subscription business model offers better scope to understand your potential customers. This enables you to create more customer-friendly products.

WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin is one of the best available plugins you can try. With a careful focus on your target audience and by maintaining good customer relationships, you can easily create a great subscription business model.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.