Selling Subscriptions on WooCommerce
WOONINJAS Selling subscriptions on WooCommerce

Selling Subscriptions on WooCommerce

If you own an eCommerce store, selling subscriptions is a great tactic for increasing sales and maintaining those sales month after month. 

By simply adding subscriptions, the customers who become subscribers will have a much higher lifetime value than the average shopper. This is because subscribers generate a recurring payment without you having to spend the money and time to find new customers. 

Utilizing WooCommerce subscription plugins will make selling subscriptions easier. In this article, we’ll go over the benefits of selling WooCommerce subscriptions, and give you an overview of the different plugin options you can use to set them up.

What are Subscriptions?

Subscriptions are a recurring payments for physical or digital products and a great way to earn automatic and guaranteed income month after month. You’ll send your customers their monthly product or give them access to digital goods as long as they continue their payment.

Building a WooCommerce subscriptions system has many benefits and allows you to create the following, 

  • A flood of loyal customers that’s excited for their products to be delivered automatically each and every month. 
  • You have the ability to set lower prices for expensive products and services allowing more customers to purchase these products which increases your revenue.
  • You can offer trial periods to your customers allowing them to test your products. Trying before you buy has the potential of increasing sales by 56%.
  • Recurring revenue for your company. 

The subscription-based popular business model has become increasingly more popular because it helps you to maintain longer customer relationships along with recurring revenue. But that’s not all.

Benefits of Adding Subscriptions to Your Store

You’ll Attract More Customers

With subscriptions, you’ll be able to provide customers with a more convenient and easy way to get their favorite products or services. They will be able to get products without ordering and have access to promos, and updates automatically which ultimately attracts more customers to your store.

Increases Your Potential Growth Exponentially

When you build a customer base of subscription users you add recurring income to your store. This reduces the cost of advertising and maintains a constant flow of income.

Gives You More Power Over Your Business

Recurring income helps you to better predict your revenue. This gives you more power over your business and potential expansion.  Unlike with a one-time payment model you no longer have to attract and then convert customers to maintain sales. When you have subscribers you are guaranteed monthly payments. You put the work up-front to attract them and gain them as a customer. 

Now you’re able to better predict your revenue each month which helps you to make informed decisions about your business decisions and its future growth. 

While the length of time that the customers remain subscribed will vary, subscription-based businesses are able to maintain ongoing relationships to create many life- long customers.  This greatly reduces the customer turnover rate and is a critical reason why they are more valuable than the average customer. 

Increases Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

When your customers subscribe to your website it helps to build trust with them. They know the quality of your products and the services you provide. This makes cross-selling and up-selling easier. You already have an established relationship and trust so they are much more receptive to your suggestions.

Easy to Offer a Proof of Concept

Offering trial periods is often impossible under most one-time payment systems. But with many of the subscription plugins for WooCommerce, you’ll find that this is a feature. Whether it’s a free trial or discounted trial price this is one of the best methods to entice clients to subscribe. But at the least, you were able to build your email list to remain in contact with them through email newsletters and/or promotions which can lead to a sign-up later.

How to sell subscriptions with WooCommerce

There are a few different types of subscriptions that you can incorporate into your eCommerce website regardless if you are selling a service, providing a streaming service, SaaS product or selling physical products. You have a variety of subscriptions that you can create – subscription boxes, upgraded services, premium packages, and more.

Here are some that you begin utilizing in your store:

Fixed usage subscription

A fixed usage subscription model is a set price for a fixed number of goods or services over a specific amount of time. The most common example of this would be magazine subscriptions. You get a fixed number of magazines for a specified number of times – weeks or months.

You can incorporate this method into your t-shirt store, with a t-shirt of the month or product of the month. 

Unlimited usage subscription

The unlimited usage subscription model offers a set price for unlimited access to a good or service. 

The usage can be personal – for example, a gym membership which gives the member unlimited access to gym facilities – or transferrable, such as a phone contract subscription which offers unlimited calls and texts to an entire family across several devices.

Pay-as-you-go-subscription

This model lets your customer purchase your products or services with a subscription for however long they would like. This is one of the most popular options because there are no long-term commitments. They are able to cancel their subscription at any time. 

Some of the most common examples of this are ‘beauty boxes. The customer pays a monthly fee and will receive a box of beauty products each month. 

Freemium model

This is a popular option for digital products. And is most commonly used by websites and cloud service providers. This type of subscription offers free content up front, and you pay for premium features.

A good example of this is music streaming services. They offer freemium subscriptions that allow you to stream music online, and if you pay monthly you’ll have additional features such as saving playlists.

Marketing your subscriptions is easy and can fit into any type of store’s email marketing campaign.  However, in order to sell subscriptions with WooCommerce, you’ll need to install one of the subscription plugins. There are plenty to choose from

At WooNinjas, we help you get set up your WooCommerce site with a variety of subscription solutions. Just give us a call and book your WooCommerce consultation.

Best WooCommerce Subscription Plugins

When choosing the right subscription-based plugin for your WooCommerce store, there are some features that you’ll want to look for to ensure easy integration, and optimal performance and will meet all of your needs. For example, it should,

  1. Support your current payment gateway.
  2. Be able to manage product subscriptions with the ability for customers to upgrade. It needs to have the exact features you need to effectively promote your products/services.
  3. Have automatic email notifications for subscriptions that are set to expire.
  4. Offers both automatic and manual billing.
  5. Have the option to stop, pause, cancel, or suspend subscriptions based on specified terms.
  6. Be able to log payments with the dashboard.

We’ve created a list of subscription plugins for WooCommerce. These plugins will help you to quickly and easily begin selling subscription-based products or services in your store. They all offer a recurring payment option that allows you to collect subscriptions for all types of products downloadable, virtual, and physical products. 

WooCommerce Subscriptions by WooCommerce

woocommerce subscriptions plugin

WooCommerce subscriptions by WooCommerce is a paid extension that will basically add a new payment method to your Woo store. While there are many free extensions that you can choose from, this plugin streamlines the process. You can easily set up and manage a WooCommerce subscription offer.

With the WooCommerce Subscription plugin, you’ll be able to automatically create invoices, easily set up drip content, create periodic billing schedules, front-end subscription management, and set up multiple subscriptions at the same time, and much more.

Features of WooCommerce Subscriptions

  • You can create multiple subscriptions for products and services
  • Entice potential customers with trial periods
  • Allow subscribers the option to manage their own plans
  • Create expiry dates for subscriptions
  • The ability to create and manage subscription products
  • WooCommerce Subscription is a feature-rich plugin that supports over 25 payment gateways for automatic recurring payments and manual renewal payments.
  • With the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, you can set different billing periods to renew subscriptions daily, weekly, monthly, and annually.

WebToffee Subscriptions for WooCommerce

wocommerce subscriptions plugin by webtoffee

Webtoffee’s Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin helps you to quickly and easily set up and manage your subscriptions for your WooCommerce store. You’ll be able to set up recurring payments and billing with ease.  

This paid plugin offers a free trial. This allows you to test out all of its features before purchasing. You’ll discover just how simple it is to create subscriptions and discover the amount of control you have over setting the price, length, interval, and other variables that are related to your subscription products or services.

Features of WebToffee are:

  • Setting up variable subscriptions for both physical products and digital products.
  • You can create multiple billing schedules.
  • Free trial, signup fee, and recurring subscription discount coupon.
  • Automatically send email notifications.
  • Synchronize the dates of the subscription products to a specific day of the month.
  • Supports all major payment gateways including PayPal and Stripe.

Subscriptio

The Subscriptio WooCommerce extension allows you to add recurring payments to WooCommerce. It gives you the ability to sell prod