Explore the list of the best WooCommerce Subscriptions plugins to turn your online store into a subscription business. These plugins will enable you to create and sell simple and variable subscription products on your WooCommerce store.
Are you planning to start a subscription model business? Or do you wanna sell subscriptions on your existing WooCommerce store? Whatever the case, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we have compiled a list of the best subscription plugins for WooCommerce stores. These plugins add valuable subscription-based features that are otherwise not available to your WooCommerce store.
Let’s get started.
Key Takeaways:
- WooCommerce, by default, doesn’t allow you to create and sell subscription products.
- With the help of third-party plugins, you can add a subscription feature in WooCommerce.
- When choosing a subscription plugin for your WooCommerce store, ensure that it supports recurring payments and auto-renewals and provides proper technical assistance.
Why You Should Sell Subscriptions in WooCommerce?
The subscription model business works as a recurring revenue business model in which customers/subscribers/members pay a recurring subscription fee to enjoy or access the subscription products or services.
Selling subscriptions on your WooCommerce store has several benefits:
- Earn a predictable revenue: Business can be tough for many. Especially when there are seasonal trends and tighter market competition, there will be fluctuations in the revenue stream. But by selling products as subscriptions, you can expect a predictable revenue for the future. No matter what happens, if you are customers are happy, they’ll continue to subscribe to your products and services.
- Increase customer loyalty: Subscriptions build a long-term relationship with the customers. It keeps them coming back for more. As it is not a one-off transaction, you have more timeframe to deliver better experiences and interactions with the customers. This increases the chances of repeat business, and you can turn your repeated customers into loyal advocates.
- Manage inventory efficiently: If you are selling physical products, you can manage inventory more effectively, as you know the demands of your customers. This will reduce the risk of stock shortages or excess.
- Convenience for Customers: Customers love the convenience of not having to reorder regularly. Whether digital content, physical products, or memberships, they appreciate the hassle-free experience.
- Upselling Opportunities: You can create subscription packages that offer premium features or bundle multiple products to increase the average order value over time.
Different Types of Subscriptions
A subscription model is nothing new; it has been around for a long time now. During its early years, subscription services were prominently used by newspapers and magazines to ensure sales during the next cycle. In recent years subscription has evolved into something more complex than just sales.
Of course, the end goal is sales, but businesses are even happy with subscription models that land them on the pathway to sales rather than outright sales.
That said, let’s look into different types of subscription services categorized based on their objective.
1. Product Subscription
The model specializes in delivering physical or intangible products to subscribed customers at specified intervals of time. For example, a subscription for a physical product like a magazine or a ‘subscription box.’
The payments can be made weekly, monthly, or yearly, depending on your need. Moreover, a single product can have multiple subscriptions. For instance, a product can have a monthly and an annual plan where the customers can pay upfront for the entire year with possibly a discount, or they can choose to go with a normal monthly plan if they so choose.
2. Membership Subscription
Here, organizations offer product/service/content memberships to the customers in return for their subscriptions. For example, Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube Premium, etc.
3. Email Subscription
Here, the customers will receive communications from the service provider/organization in return for their subscription. The communication can include information regarding new sales, promo codes, product updates, and more. Companies are building potential email marketing targets with email subscriptions.
Pros
- Recurring payments provide stability to your revenue
- Helps to build a potential target for up-selling and cross-selling
- Staging payments in a monthly or weekly cycle instead of a single payment helps attract more customers
- Subscription enables you to offer competitive prices for expensive products (This is a sure purchase recurrence; this helps to pacify your dip in revenue because of the price lowering.)
- Easier to set up free trials for customers
- Easier for customers to upgrade or downgrade their subscription
Cons
- More churn and uncertain revenue during the initial phases until you establish yourselves in the market
- Customers may be hesitant to commit to a recurring payment unless you provide new actual value to them every time, thus making it difficult to acquire new customers
1. Subscriptions for WooCommerce by WebToffee
Grow your store with Subscriptions for WooCommerce!
Subscriptions for WooCommerce is a premium subscription plugin by WebToffee which helps you set up and manage recurring payments/billing for your store.
The plugin offers both simple and variable subscription models for physical, virtual, and downloadable products. You can set up free trials and charge sign-up fees with customizations in the product. Moreover, you can create a recurring discount coupon for your customers. If the customers apply the coupon to the subscription order once, the coupon will be automatically applied during all renewals.
The plugin supports all major payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, etc. Also, you can add multiple billing schedules with the plugin.
Subscription rates for simple subscription products are calculated based on the subscription interval, whereas the subscription rate for variable subscription products may vary with pricing and billing schedules.
Additionally, the plugin offers customizations that enable you to automatically notify your customers/subscribers via email if something happens to your subscription, for example, account expiration, free trial, suspended account, completed, and so on.
Key features:
- Simple and Variable subscriptions can be set up for both physical and downloadable products
- Supports setting signup fee.
- Supports offering a free trial.
- Ability to synchronize and pro-rate subscriptions
- Offers multiple billing schedules.
- Send automatic email notifications to subscribers.
- Automatically re-bills/re-initiate failed subscription payments.
- Compatible with payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, etc.
2. WooCommerce Subscriptions by WooCommerce
The WooCommerce Subscriptions is a premium WordPress plugin for WooCommerce that enables you to set up a fully functional subscription-based e-Store. The plugin provides features such as multiple subscription creation, periodic billing schedules, automatic invoice generator, etc.
It also offers other functionalities like sign-up fees, free trials, multiple billing periods, and expiration periods for subscription products. Additionally, the plugin allows your customers/subscribers to upgrade, downgrade or crossgrade between their subscription plans.
WooCommerce Subscription offers a plethora of payment gateway options for automatic recurring and manual renewal payments. Manual renewal payments done through the WooCommerce payment gateway automatically generate email invoices and receipts.
The plugin is really handy and easy to work with. You can even control most of the plugin functionalities from the dashboard itself.
Key features:
- Provides subscribers the flexibility to manage their own plans
- Enables setting up multiple subscription products
- Automatic renewal notifications to subscribers
- Automatic re-billing of failed subscription payments
- Compatible with a large number of payment gateways
- Enables customers to upgrade or downgrade their subscription plans
3. YITH WooCommerce Subscription Plugin
YITH WooCommerce subscription plugin enables you to sell simple, virtual, and downloadable subscription plugins to customers. The plugin allows you to create unlimited subscription plans for your products that the customers can purchase. The YITH plugin also makes it easy for users to upgrade, downgrade or switch between the plans.
The plugin also provides the configurations to let customers pause the subscription, cancel the plan, and more. With Yith, you can decide what should happen to a subscription if the user fails to make the payment.
You can also set up email notifications to send you and your customers alert on major actions like failed payments, subscriptions getting suspended, etc. Additionally, the plugin facilitates two additional coupons which offer discounts on the signup and recurring fees.
The plugin also enables the following functions: integration with YITH WooCommerce Membership, payment synchronization, export subscriptions to CSV file, monitoring subscription and income from the dashboard, etc.
Key features:
- Offers free trial and signup fee options for subscription products
- Options to allow customers to simultaneously purchase multiple subscriptions
- Options for users to switch between subscription plans of products
- Supports multiple payment gateways
- Offers automatic subscription renewal
4. SUMO Subscriptions – WooCommerce Subscription Plugin
SUMO Subscriptions is a comprehensive WooCommerce subscription plugin with which you can create and sell simple, variable, and grouped product subscriptions.
The plugin offers features like payment synchronization, custom subscription duration, custom number of renewals, pre-approved subscription renewals, prorate synchronized subscription, etc.
The SUMO Subscription plugin has built-in PayPal and Stripe payment gateways for automatic renewal of subscriptions without user authorization. Additionally, the subscribers have the option to switch between automatic or manual payment renewal. They can even cancel their subscription at any point in time.
The WooCommerce admins can control features like manually generating subscription orders, assigning the order to users, adding or deducting shipping charges and tax during renewals, etc. in the SUMO plugin.
Key features:
- Offers subscription payment synchronization
- Enables customers to purchase subscriptions with normal products
- Has built-in PayPal and Stripe gateways
- Enables subscribers to switch between manual and automatic subscription
- Facilitates free and paid product trials before the subscription
- Works brilliantly on all themes that support WooCommerce
5. Paid Memberships Pro
If you want to sell digital content on your WooCommerce store, this is the right plugin for you. The Paid Memberships Pro plugin allows you to sell memberships to your customers. It supports different content formats such as courses, videos, forums, products, events, podcasts, and more.
You can show sneak peeks of the content on your website. You can also hide premium content from non-subscribers. The plugin allows you to limit access to a specific number of views before hitting the paywall. It will show personalized content suggestions to your subscribers. You can secure your digital content across your multisite network with a single login.
Key features:
- Secure digital content with restrictions
- Show sneak peeks and hide premium content
- Drip content based on membership
- Show personalized content
6. Subscriptions for WooCommerce
WP Swing’s Subscriptions Plugin is a simple plugin that allows you to create and sell WooCommerce subscriptions. It enables you to sell different types of subscription products or services in WooCommerce. You can create an OTT platform, offer gym memberships and online courses, or sell physical products as a subscription.
The plugin allows you to offer a free trial of products to your customers. You can create a trouble-free recurring revenue. The plugin is compatible with PayPal Standard payment gateway and allows you to set up recurring payments for subscriptions.
Key features:
- Sell different types of subscriptions
- Compatible with PayPal payment gateway
- Set up recurring payments
- Offer free trials to subscribers
- Cancel WooCommerce subscriptions anytime
7. Paid Membership Subscriptions
Paid Member Subscriptions plugin helps you grow your recurring revenue for your WooCommerce store. You can set up and sell memberships in WooCommerce. It lets you accept recurring payments, register and manage new members, create subscription plans, and restrict access to premium content.
The plugin offers an easy interface to help you start your subscription business in just a few minutes. It integrates with WooCommerce, allows you to hide WooCommerce products, and restricts non-subscribers from purchasing member-only products.
Key features:
- Create and manage subscriptions
- Accept recurring payments
- Easy integration with WooCommerce
- Hide products from non-subscribers
8. WooCommerce Memberships
WooCommerce Memberships by SkyVerge lets you sell memberships on your WooCommerce store. You can sell memberships as a product on your WooCommerce store. The plugin allows you to effectively share access to the content on your website for each membership. You can set up drip content delivery, meaning you can choose when your subscribers should access the content.
The plugin will create tiered memberships for different plans. You can reward members with special discounts on your store website. You can also send subscription expiry and renewal reminder emails to your subscribers to prompt them to renew or update their membership.
Key features:
- Set up memberships in WooCommerce
- Grant access to content effectively
- Offer exclusive discounts to subscribers
- Import and export members using CSV
- Set up renewal reminder emails
Selecting a plugin to handle your WooCommerce subscriptions is a delicate and troublesome process. It’s much riskier than other plugins, as this can directly impact your subscription sales and revenue. For that reason, we have provided you with a hand-picked selection of WooCommerce Subscription plugins to help you set up a fully compatible subscription-based WooCommerce store.
Have you tried out any of the products yet? Do let us know what you think in the comment section below.
