How to Create WooCommerce Subscription Products (Step-by-Step)

If your WooCommerce store sells anything customers buy repeatedly — supplements, coffee, software, content, physical boxes — a subscription model will almost certainly grow your revenue faster than one-time sales. Subscribers spend more over time, churn less than casual buyers, and make your monthly numbers easier to forecast.

Setting up subscription products in WooCommerce takes about 15 minutes once you have the right plugin. WooCommerce doesn’t include recurring billing natively, so you’ll need an extension. There are several superior subscription-based plugins available for WooCommerce, and this guide covers the full setup using the Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin by WebToffee.

WooCommerce subscription products are products or services that customers purchase on a recurring billing schedule. Instead of paying once, customers are charged at regular intervals such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.

For example, you can create subscription products for:

• Monthly snack boxes
• Weekly grocery deliveries
• Annual software licenses
• Online memberships
• Magazine subscriptions
• Digital downloads
• Streaming or content access
• Maintenance or support plans
• Fitness, coaching, or learning programs

A WooCommerce subscription product usually includes a recurring price, billing interval, subscription length, renewal settings, and payment method. Depending on your store’s requirements, you can also offer sign-up fees, free trials, synchronized renewals, and prorated first payments.

The subscription model has been around for a long time, but it is currently on the rise across industries and verticals. The trend is the same in the case of WooCommerce too. The influence of the subscription-based model on WooCommerce is becoming more apparent by the day. The driving surge for WooCommerce subscriptions is mainly due to the changes in consumer trends and advancements in technology.

A subscription service offers convenience and affordability to customers all the while providing stability for businesses.

• Less cost of acquiring new subscribers
• Lesser spending on customer retention
• More predictability in revenue
• Better inventory management
• Upselling and cross-selling opportunities
• Easy to offer a trial period

A subscription product can be a physical, downloadable, or virtual product. To create such products that are to be repeatedly delivered to the subscribers at regular intervals of time, you will need a subscription plugin.

Here are the complete steps involved in creating a subscription product on your WooCommerce store with the plugin ‘Subscriptions for WooCommerce’.

Step 1: Install and Activate the ‘Subscriptions for WooCommerce’ plugin

‘Subscriptions for WooCommerce’ is a premium WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. The first step in the installation is to purchase the plugin. Once it is done, you can find the plugin .zip file under My Account > API Downloads.

Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins > Add New. Upload the plugin and click on Install Now. You can activate the plugin once the installation is complete.

Step 2: Create a WooCommerce Subscriptions Product

You can create simple and variable subscriptions with the ‘Subscriptions for WooCommerce’ plugin. Let’s create a simple subscription here.

A simple subscription is a normal product with no additional customizations or variations. Whereas a variable subscription will have multiple product variations. For example, a magazine is a simple subscription product while a shirt in multiple sizes is a variable subscription product. Let’s look at the case of creating a simple subscription product. 

To create a simple product in your WooCommerce store,

• Go to Products > Add New on your WordPress dashboard.
• Provide a product name and a description. Let’s add the subscription name as ‘Snacks box’ and specify all the individual products in the snack box in the description column.
• Select Simple subscription under Product data.

• If your product is virtual or downloadable, check the corresponding boxes. In our example the product is physical, so ignore this step.

Step 3: Set the Subscription Price and Billing Interval

In the General tab of the product data section, enter the subscription pricing details.

You can configure options such as:

• Recurring subscription price
• Billing interval
• Subscription length
• Sign-up fee
• Free trial period
• Sale price
• Subscription synchronization
• Payment proration

For example, you can set the subscription price as $62 every two months and set the subscription length as 24 months. This means the customer will receive the product 12 times in total, once every two months for two years.

You can also add a $10 sign-up fee and offer a 14-day free trial to encourage first-time customers to subscribe.

Step 4: Configure Inventory, Shipping, and Related Product Settings

After setting the subscription price, complete the remaining product settings.

Depending on your product type, configure:

• Inventory management
• SKU
• Stock status
• Shipping weight and dimensions
• Shipping class
• Linked products
• Product categories and tags
• Product image and gallery

If you are selling a physical subscription box, make sure the shipping settings are accurate. If you are selling a virtual subscription, shipping settings are not required.

Once all product details are ready, click Publish.

Your subscription product will now appear in your WooCommerce store, and customers will see a Subscribe button instead of the usual one-time purchase flow.

Step 5: Set Up Recurring Payment Options

Once the product is created, the next thing that you should do is to create payment gateway options via which your customers can automatically or manually renew their subscriptions.

The payment gateways authenticate the recurring transactions, making payment renewal a possibility for your customers. The plugin ‘Subscriptions for WooCommerce’ supports several payment gateways including

• PayPal Standard by WooCommerce
• PayPal Reference by WooCommerce
• WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Payment Gateway by WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway by WooCommerce
• Stripe Payment Gateway (premium)
• Paypal Express Payment Gateway (premium)
• PayPal Payments Pro (PayFlow) by Angel Eye
• PayPal REST by Angel Eye
• Credit Card by Mollie Payment for WooCommerce
• Ideal by Mollie Payment for WooCommerce

All the payment gateway plugins listed above support both manual and automatic payment renewal.

Moreover, these plugins enable both you and your customer to change the subscription status, if required, directly from the WordPress dashboard. The available status changes include suspension, cancellation, and reactivation.

Manual payment renewal of a subscription means that the customer will have to manually initiate the payment at the end of each subscription period to keep receiving the products or services.

Whereas if you choose automatic payment renewal, the payment gateway will automatically initiate the renewal process on your behalf. This saves customers from the trouble of visiting your site during every subscription recurrence period. Note that, every subsequent payment uses the payment mode used during the previous renewal. If this requires to be changed, your or the customer will have to change their payment mode in WooCommerce manually.

Step 6: Place a Test Subscription Order

Your customers can place WooCommerce subscription orders in the same way they place any other order in your store. However, to place a subscription order, you require a payment gateway that accepts recurring payments. So make sure to enable a payment gateway for WooCommerce subscriptions before proceeding.

Say, for example, your customers need to purchase the ‘Snacks box’ subscription that we have set up earlier. The product will be displayed along with all other items in the store. You can click on Subscribe button corresponding to the product to add it to the cart.

Click on the Proceed to checkout button to continue with the checkout procedure.

On the Checkout page, provide the necessary information such as the billing and payment details. Once you have completed the payment, you will receive the order confirmation via an automated email.

WooCommerce subscription synchronization and prorating payments are some of the most fundamental practices in subscription payments. For those who are unaware of subscription synchronization and payment proration, here is everything you need to know.

By default, the first subscription renewal in WooCommerce will be initiated only after completing the specified subscription duration. For instance, in our Snacks box example, if you are subscribing to the Snacks box on the 5th of January, you will have to renew the subscription on the 5th of March (the subscription duration is two months). This means every customer will have different renewal dates for the same product.

If you want all the subscriptions for a product to be renewed on a specific date, you can synchronize the renewal date. Say, you want all the customers who have subscribed to the Snacks box to complete their payments by the first of every month. Specify the Subscription Synchronization as the first day of every month. This means that even if you have subscribed on the 5th of January, you will have to renew the subscription on the 1st of March.

On the other hand, by synchronizing the subscription you may be cutting down the renewal duration (only during the first renewal). In our Snacks box example, you are essentially taking 4 days out of the first subscription period. This calls for a reduction in the first payment of the subscription. This is known as prorating the first payment. Here the subscription amount will be calculated based on the number of days between the first payment and the first renewal.

Note that subscription synchronization is not enabled by default in the plugin settings. You will have to first enable it to configure synchronization in subscription products. To do so,

• Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions.
• Check Subscription synchronization under Other.

This will add subscription synchronization and first payment proration options under Product > Product data > General.

You can configure the subscription synchronization and first payment proration while setting up the subscription product.

You can even set up subscription renewal reminder emails to notify all subscribers of the recurring payment.

WooCommerce does not include complete subscription functionality natively. To sell recurring products, you need a subscription plugin.

There are both free and paid WooCommerce subscription plugins available. Free plugins can be useful for basic use cases, but paid plugins usually offer more advanced subscription management, better payment gateway compatibility, renewal handling, support, and long-term scalability.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Feature	Free WooCommerce subscription plugins	Paid WooCommerce subscription plugins
Best for	Basic subscription setup and testing	Serious subscription stores and recurring revenue businesses
Subscription product types	Usually limited	Often supports simple and variable subscriptions
Recurring billing options	Basic billing intervals	Flexible billing schedules and renewal options
Automatic renewals	May be limited or gateway-dependent	Usually better support for automatic recurring payments
Free trials	May be available in limited form	Commonly supported
Sign-up fees	Often limited	Commonly supported
Subscription synchronization	Usually limited	More likely to be available
Payment proration	Usually limited	More likely to be available
Payment gateway support	Limited	Broader gateway compatibility
Customer subscription management	Basic	More complete customer and admin controls
Support and updates	Community or limited support	Premium support and regular updates
Best use case	Small stores testing subscriptions	Growing stores that rely on recurring revenue

If you only need a very basic subscription setup, a free plugin may be enough to get started. However, if subscriptions are important to your business model, a paid plugin is usually the better choice.

The WebToffee Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin is a premium option designed for store owners who need practical subscription features such as simple and variable subscriptions, recurring billing, free trials, sign-up fees, subscription length, synchronization, and renewal management.

Subscription offers you a steady income with minimal work and maintenance. The popularity of subscription products is growing at an increasingly rapid pace. You can seamlessly tap into this growing market by expanding your WooCommerce store to include subscription products.

Nevertheless, you can manage all your subscription-related settings with a single WooCommerce plugin. This means that there is a high potential market open for you and your store to expand. Our suggestion is to make the best out of it!

If you are planning to expand your WooCommerce store to incorporate subscriptions, try the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin.

Also, check out the WooCommerce Import Export plugin for WooCommerce Subscription Orders for subscription-related data migration.

Let us know your thoughts and comments about WooCommerce subscriptions and this article in the comments section.