Sell subscriptions with WooCommerce

One of the best things about WooCommerce is its ability to be extended beyond its core functionality to cater for lots of other eCommerce scenarios. One of the most common scenarios is subscriptions.

A common misconception is that WooCommerce is just for selling physical products. While it does indeed do that probably better than any other WordPress eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce can handle pretty much any kind of product or service you might wish to sell online through the use of dedicated WooCommerce plugins. Just like WordPress itself, there is a very healthy ecosystem of WooCommerce plugins that we’ve been covering a lot over the past few months.

Subscriptions and WooCommerce

There are a few subscriptions plugins available in the ecosystem for WooCommerce, but the best one I’ve come across to date is the official WooThemes WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

This little beauty will let you setup recurring payments for customers in a matter of minutes. Recurring payments can be charged daily, weekly, monthly or annually. You can also add an initial signup fee. It can also be used in combination with the Groups extension to to allow you to define different subscription levels.

How are recurring payments handled?

Anyone who has built their own recurring subscriptions functionality will know what a pain in the behind this can be to get right. Thankfully this plugin integrates seamlessly with Paypal’s subscription engine. While Paypal might not be everyone’s favourite payment gateway, the combination of this plugin and the Paypal subscriptions engine means that anyone can pretty much setup their own Subscriptions business in a few minutes and probably save tens of thousands in custom software development costs. You can always scale up to a more sophisticated platform in the future if you need it. Let’s keep things lean!

A single site license will cost you $199 which is a steal for what you’re getting. Check it out today.