Subscription businesses are on the rise now. While it ensures businesses with recurring revenue, customers are offered an easy way of accessing their favorite products and services.
If you are planning on starting a subscription business or turning your existing WooCommerce store into a subscription model, this article will be of great help.
Especially when you want to earn recurring payments through WooCommerce without paying “recurring transaction fee” for the platform that creates it, you might want to start out with some affordable solutions.
Following is a list of the best 6 free and paid WooCommerce subscriptions plugins you can find to scale your WooCommerce store to a subscription model. Read on and choose the right plugin from the list.
1. Subscriptions for WooCommerce by WebToffee
WooCommerce Subscriptions by WebToffee is one of the popular plugins for selling subscription products in your WooCommerce store. You can set up and sell both simple and variable subscriptions using the plugin.
Offering free trials has become a common promotional strategy for subscription-based products. It allows prospective customers to experience the product fully and purchase the subscription as a result. With the plugin, you can easily set up free trials for your products for a defined number of days/weeks/months/years.
This subscription plugin also supports setting up a sign-up fee exclusive of the actual subscription price of the products.
Renewals are the core of the subscription business. A complicated renewal process can increase the churn rate. With the plugin, you can set up subscriptions having daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly renewals.
Recurring discounts are another popular feature of the plugin. You can offer discounts for every subscription renewal. Both recurring fixed value and percentage subscription coupons can be created using the plugin.
Notable Features of the Plugin
- Set up and sell both simple and variable subscriptions
- Supports daily/weekly/monthly/yearly subscriptions
- Offer recurring discounts (fixed and percentage discounts)
- Supports Stripe and PayPal payment gateways
- Offer a free trial for products
- Set up a signup fee
- Enable email notifications for various email status(es)
- Synchronize and prorate subscription renewals
Pricing: $89 for 1 year of technical support and plugin updates.
2. WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce Subscriptions is another popular subscription plugin. It also comes with a bundle of features to make selling subscriptions easy for WooCommerce stores. This plugin supports variable subscriptions so that your customers can choose a subscription that suits their needs. You can even allow customers to choose their own billing schedule.
Subscription management can be made easier for the store admin with the options to suspend or cancel a subscription, change its trial expiration, add items, shipping, fees, or taxes to the subscription simply from the admin dashboard.
Subscribers can also easily manage their own subscriptions from their MY Account page. From the subscription page, they can suspend or cancel a subscription, change the shipping address or payment methods, or upgrade/downgrade subscriptions on their own.
This plugin works great with Stripe Payment Gateway and Enhancer for WooCommerce Subscriptions.
Below you can take a look at how to customize email templates of WooCommerce Subscriptions and Stripe Payment Gateway.
The plugin also reduces the payment gateway fees that occur when a customer purchases multiple subscription products by grouping the products. Cart discounts, product discounts, recurring discounts can also be created with the plugin.
Notable features of the plugin
- Set up free trials and sign-up fees
- Supports variable subscriptions
- Option to choose suitable billing schedule
- Easy subscription management at both store admin and subscriber level
- Payment synchronization
- Multiple subscriptions management
- Different types of subscription coupons
- Renewal notifications
- Integration with over 25 payment gateways
- Support for manual renewal of payments
Please note: To customize WooCommerce Subscriptions, get YayMail Addon for WooCommerce Subscriptions activated on your store today!
3. SUMO Subscriptions
SUMO Subscriptions is another great option for creating simple, variable, and grouped product subscriptions in your WooCommerce store. Unlike other subscription plugins, sumo subscriptions let you offer free and paid trials for your customers.
While purchasing a subscription product or service users can select the subscription duration. For easy management of subscriptions, stores are provided with the option to synchronize subscription payments.
The plugin allows your customers to purchase multiple subscriptions, subscriptions, and non-subscription products in a single checkout.
Notable features of the plugin
- Supports both free and paid trials
- Built-in PayPal recurring payments and Stripe subscriptions support
- Send multiple payment reminder emails
- Master log to record all the transactions throughout the site
- Easy subscription management for site admins and subscribers
If you currently use SUMO Subscriptions on your WooCommerce store, we recommend installing YayMail Addon for SUMO Subscriptions so that you can customize all SUMO Subscriptions email with YayMail drag and drop interface.
4. Subscriptions For WooCommerce Pro (By WP Swings)
Subscriptions for WooCommerce Pro plugin allow you to sell products or services on a recurring basis. It is an add-on for the popular WooCommerce plugin, which is a platform for building an online store on WordPress.
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can create subscription products and manage the subscription lifecycle, including signing up customers, tracking renewals, and handling cancellations. You can also set up automatic payments, offer discounts or free trials, and manage customer accounts.
Some common use cases for WooCommerce Subscriptions include selling monthly or annual memberships, selling physical or digital products on a recurring basis, and offering subscription services such as meal delivery or online courses.
If you have a WooCommerce store and want to add subscription functionality, you can install the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin and set it up according to your specific needs.
Notable features of the plugin:
- Subscription for WooCommerces Pro enables admin to create exclusive coupons for customers.
- Customers can make a single purchase of a product via a one-time payment.
- WooCommerce Subscriptions Pro plugin lets merchants re-attempt a failed recurring payment of a particular WooCommerce subscription plan.
- Merchants can also enable offline payments for plans where the payment link is sent to the customer via email.
- Compatible with WooCommerce Eway Gateway, Authorize.Net Payment Gateway For WooCommerce, WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway, WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Payment Gateway, WooCommerce Payments, and more.
5. All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions
This extension for WooCommerce subscriptions help you offer any of your existing products on your store as a subscription.
With this addon, you can make simple or variable WooCommerce products available on subscription while also keeping the product listing as a one time purchase.
It’s a really neat plugin with a clean UI and lots of customization options:
- Discounts for product subscription
- Tooltip with expandable info
- Multiple payment gateways for automatic recurring payments
- 2 layout styles
6. YITH WooCommerce Subscription (Free)
This free WooCommerce subscription plugin lets you create and manage unlimited subscription plans for simple virtual/downloadable products of your WooCommerce store. You can set the renewal to happen on a monthly or daily basis with the plugin.
Unlike the above plugins, it offers a minimal number of features free of cost. For advanced features, you may purchase the premium version of the plugin.
Notable features of the plugin
- Set up subscriptions for simple products
- Supports monthly or daily renewals
- Allows subscribers to stop subscriptions from their PayPal account
7. YITH WooCommerce Subscriptions Pro
The pro version of YITH subscriptions comes with features such as variation subscriptions, free trials, and easy subscription management. Email notifications can be set for both store admins and customers. It works great with many WooCommerce themes.
Sign-up fee based discounts, product-based discounts, cart-based discounts, etc., can be created with the help of the plugin.
Notable features of the plugin
- Supports both simple and variable subscriptions
- Easy subscription management for both users and admins
- Set up free trials and sign-up fee
- Apply coupons on recurring payment charges
- Synchronize all recurring payments to a specific day
- Export all the subscriptions to a CSV file
- Schedule the delivery of products linked to a subscription
- Built-in dashboard for monitoring subscriptions and income
8. Subcriptio
Subcriptio is another plugin to turn your WooCommerce business into a subscription model. It comes with a bunch of user-friendly features to flourish your subscription business. Using the plugin you can turn both simple and variable products in your store into a subscription model.
A free trial can be configured of any suitable length and a sign-up fee can also be charged. If your WooCommerce store sells both subscription and non-subscription products, you can let your customers purchase both on a single checkout.
Just like related products, you can display related subscriptions for each order that contains subscriptions. Stripe and PayPal payment gateways are supported for automatic subscription payments.
Notable features of the plugin
- Allows to sell subscriptions for both simple and variable products
- Supports Stripe and PayPal for automatic subscription payments
- Set any billing cycle length and max subscription length
- Option to charge a sign-up fee
- Offer a free trial for any length of time
- Let purchase subscription and non-subscription products in a single checkout
- Subscriptions can be paused, resumed, and canceled manually
Conclusion
It takes less effort and expense to retain customers than to acquire new ones. If you haven’t turned your WooCommerce business into a subscription model yet, now is the time. Pick the right plugin from the list and get started with selling subscriptions and ensuring recurring revenue.
Which WooCommerce subscriptions plugin is your favorite? Feel free to suggest it in the comment section below.
For other helpful ecommerce advice, check out more topics in our WooCommerce tutorials section.
