Share:
Table of Contents
Managing inventory in a WooCommerce store is never an easy task, especially when you’re offering subscription products. Juggling multiple renewal dates, tracking active plans, and ensuring timely billing can quickly spiral out of control.
This is where the synchronize WooCommerce subscriptions feature becomes essential. By aligning your subscription renewals to a common date, you can easily manage billing, improve customer experience, and simplify store operations.
The Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin by WebToffee makes it easy to create both simple and variable subscription products and set up synchronized renewals with or without proration.
Key Takeaways
- Learn how to synchronize WooCommerce subscriptions using the WebToffee plugin for smoother billing cycles.
- Discover how to set renewal dates for subscription products and optionally enable prorated billing.
- Improve your store’s subscription management with WooCommerce synchronized renewals.
Ready to explore how to create subscription products and how WooCommerce subscription synchronization helps manage them more efficiently? Let’s jump in!
Subscription products are products that are to be repeatedly delivered to the customers at regular intervals of time. Shoppers are billed on a recurring basis, making it essential for store owners to manage renewals efficiently.
Let’s say you offer a WooCommerce subscription product that renews monthly. If Customer A buys it on the 1st, B on the 2nd, and C on the 3rd, you’ll end up processing subscription renewals on different days every month. This means that you will have to monitor the subscription renewal dates of individual users, keep track of their payment process, and manage the inventory.
Now, multiply that by several subscription products and hundreds of customers, and it becomes a logistical nightmare.
So, what is the solution to this? Synchronize WooCommerce subscription renewals that is!
With a third-party plugin like WebToffee’s WooCommerce Subscription plugin, you can synchronize subscription renewals, meaning all subscriptions for a product will renew on the same set date, regardless of when the customer subscribed.
This process, known as synchronizing WooCommerce subscriptions, helps you align subscription payments, simplify inventory planning, and reduce admin overhead. It’s especially useful for businesses to group their billing cycles and improve efficiency.
What is proration billing in subscriptions?
Proration billing means charging customers only for the portion of the subscription they use before the next renewal date. When you synchronize WooCommerce subscriptions to a specific date, like the 1st of every month, proration ensures that customers who sign up mid-cycle are billed only for the days remaining. For example, if someone joins on the 10th, they’ll pay only for the 10th to the 30th, not the whole month.
It’s a useful way to align subscription payments WooCommerce style, so all renewals happen on the same date while keeping charges accurate. This keeps things simpler for store owners and customers and is a key benefit when setting up WooCommerce synchronized renewals.
With the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin from WebToffee, you can create subscription products and enable subscription synchronization. It also offers essential features such as free trials, sign-up fees for new subscriptions, proration billing, automatic and manual subscription renewals, and more.
To synchronize WooCommerce subscriptions,
Step 1: Install WebToffee’s Subscriptions for WooCommerece Plugin
You will have to install and activate the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin in your WordPress console to avail of its features. You can do so by going to Plugins > Add New > Upload from the WordPress dashboard.
Step 2: Configure the Synchronize WooCommerce Subscriptions Option
- Go to WooCommerce > Settings > WebToffee Subscriptions to access the WooCommerce synchronized renewals settings.
- Scroll down and enable the Subscription Synchronisation option to synchronize subscription renewals.
- Review the remaining settings and click Save changes.
Step 3: Create a WooCommerce Subscription Product
- Go to Products > Add New from your WordPress dashboard.
- Provide a suitable product name for your subscription product.
- Now go to the Product data widget and choose the product type as a subscription. It can either be a simple subscription or a variable subscription. Let’s go with the Simple subscription.
- The General tab provides the necessary information regarding your subscription. Here, you can provide details such as subscription price, the subscription renewal interval, when it should expire, sign-up fees and free trial length, sales price, sales schedule, and more.
- Similarly, go through the other tabs in the Product data widget (Inventory, Shipping, Linked Products, Attributes, and Advanced) and provide the necessary information. For instance, if you want the users searching for this particular subscription product to recommend another related product, add it as a cross-sell under the Linked Products tab. For example: suggest ‘toothbrush subscription’ to customers purchasing ‘toothpaste subscription’.
Step 3: Synchronize WooCommerce Subscription Renewals
To synchronize WooCommerce subscriptions, go to the General tab > Subscription Synchronization field. Select when you want the subscription to renew for all the customers subscribing to this product.
The options available for synchronizing WooCommerce subscriptions vary based on your renewal period. If your subscription renews
- Weekly: You can choose to sync the renewal on any day of the week
- Monthly: You can choose to renew the subscription on any day of the month.
- Yearly: You can align the renewal date for the subscriptions to any specific day of the year.
Let’s select the 2nd day of the month as the synchronized day.
Once the WooCommerce subscription synchronization data is selected, you can publish the subscription. Optionally, you may check the Enable Prorate first payment to activate prorate billing for your WooCommerce subscriptions.
This means that the subscription for the toothpaste will be renewed on the 2nd of every month. This renewal date stands independent of the purchase date and will be the same for all customers subscribed to the product.
That’s it! You’ve successfully created a WooCommerce subscription product with synchronized subscription renewals and a prorate billing cycle using the plugin. But this is just one of the many features of this powerful tool for WooCommerce subscription synchronization. Let’s briefly explore the other features available to help you set up WooCommerce subscriptions.
The Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin houses several other features in addition to subscription synchronization. Some of its features include, but are not limited to,
- Supports simple and variable subscription products
- Supports several popular payment gateways
- Prorating the first payment
- Manage subscription renewal intervals
- Offer sales on subscription products and schedule sales
- Setting up sign-up fees
- Ability to offer a free trial of any length
- Automatically notify admin and customers of major subscription-related information via email.
- Compatibility with multilingual platforms.
What are the benefits of synhronizing WooCommerce subscription renewals?
- Simplifies billing cycles by aligning all renewals to a set date
- Improves customer experience with predictable renewal schedules
- Reduces failed payments by avoiding irregular billing dates
- Eases subscription management for store owners
- Enables proration
Adding subscription products to your WooCommerce store can help you improve sales and even attract new customers. However, the subscription comes with its own issues such as dispatching the products based on the renewal periods and more. That’s where the subscription synchronization feature of the WebToffee plugin comes in.
With the ability to synchronize WooCommerce subscription renewals, you can align all renewals to a specific date, reduce complexity, and even prorate WooCommerce subscriptions when needed. Best of all, this feature is built into the plugin.
And that brings us to the end of this article on synchronizing WooCommerce subscriptions. If you’ve found this helpful or have more questions about synchronizing subscription renewals in WooCommerce, drop a comment below!
You can enable synchronized renewals in your WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin settings. This aligns all subscription renewals to occur on the same date, regardless of when the customer subscribes.
Proration billing means charging customers only for the portion of the subscription they use before the next renewal date.
All customers are charged on the same set date. If they join mid-cycle, they’ll pay a smaller, adjusted amount at first, then full payments on future renewal dates.
Yes, the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin by WebToffee includes a built-in option to synchronize renewals, along with proration settings to manage fair billing.
