When your eCommerce business model is subscription-based, you can use WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin to easily manage your subscriptions and skyrocket your sales. This is one of the most popular choices for any eCommerce business. But if you want to keep your options open, then you can take a look at these other amazing alternatives to WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.
Let’s start with what does WooCommerce subscriptions mean? WooCommerce subscriptions are a great way to generate recurring sales from your customers. Subscriptions are also an important part of setting up recurring billing for membership sites that sell digital products, magazines, subscription box businesses, podcasters, other content creators, etc.
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Top 6 Advantages Of Using WooCommerce Subscriptions
Before jumping into a comparison of WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin and their alternatives, let’s check out the benefits of having this plugin. The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin has a variety of options which makes it the ideal option for subscription-based businesses. We have mentioned the top advantages here for you.
Able To Create Multiple Packages & Subscription Plans
The extension allows you to create as many subscription packages as you need each time you want to make recurring payments for your business. A custom billing schedule is also provided to allow customers to choose one that meets their needs. You can also offer a free trial, which allows your potential customers to try your subscription product or service before they purchase, as well as specify the duration of the trial.
Handling Customers with Exclusive Options
In practice, almost all sorts of payment issues will arise. Some customers may decide to get a free trial, only to run out of time and request an extension.
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you get advanced features to handle all of these common customer payment issues, such as auto-rebilling features for cases of failed subscription payment issues and many more.
Schedule Your WooCommerce Subscriptions With Flexibility
In WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, you can begin the subscription schedule immediately after a subscriber has made a payment.
In some cases, you can offer the products to all subscribers on the same day. This is usually practiced by eCommerce businesses that sell subscription boxes to their customers, such as FairyLoot and OwlCrate.
If you are running a similar business, you can use WooCommerce Subscription plugin and its flexible subscription scheduling feature to make sure that all customers are billed on the same date.
Boost Conversions Using Fully Customizable Coupons & Discounts
You can easily boost your subscriptions by creating time-limited coupons and discounts. You can implement this on your WooCommerce store by providing exclusive coupons on various occasions. With WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, coupons for recurring payments and signup can be easily managed.
Reduce Customer's Payment Gateway Fees With Multiple Plans
In certain circumstances, your customers may want to purchase more than one product at the same time. This is because most payment gateways add a percentage fee to each transaction, resulting in a significant increase in fees.
Also, when your customers make separate payments for each purchase, you have to think about logistics and renewals for each purchase, besides having to pay for the payment gateway separately. Subscription products provide a unique opportunity to address this problem.
WooCommerce Subscriptions offers a unique solution to address the issue when the customer chooses two separate “packs”. The extension will help you organize similar items and reduce fees for your business.
Manage And Customize Email Notifications For Subscriptions
Transactional notification is great for eCommerce sites, but ensuring consistency across all communications with your clients means using your brand’s tone of voice. The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin allows for full email notification support for both admins and customers.
5 Top Alternatives To WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugin
We will now mention several WooCommerce Subscription plugin alternatives that would help you set up and automate recurring sales-focused subscriptions at your stores.
1. YITH WooCommerce Subscription: Most Popular Alternative
YITH WooCommerce Subscription allows you to create subscriptions for your products and make them available for a particular period of time to the subscribers. If you want to offer your subscribers reviews, videos, learning courses, podcasts, hosting, and anything else in installments, creating subscription plans for such services is now very easy. This will ensure a steady income from your site and more control over your sales volume.
Exclusive Features of YITH WooCommerce Subscription
☑️ YITH WooCommerce Subscription plugin allows you to create unlimited subscription plans for physical products, virtual downloadable products, and so on.
☑️ Your subscribers can directly stop their subscriptions from Paypal accounts.
☑️ For each product, you can set different types of renewals, whether monthly or daily.
☑️ You can automate your subscribers to ensure constant and scheduled revenue to your site.
2. Subscriptions for WooCommerce by WebToffee
WebToffee for WooCommerce subscriptions is another great plugin that you can use for setting up and managing recurring payments and billing at your store. This WooCommerce Subscriptions alternative plugin is a paid plugin, but you will get the chance to explore a free trial before purchasing it.
Main Features To Check Out In WebToffee
☑️ From simple subscription plans to multi-layer plans, you can create different types of plans for your customers.
☑️ This plugin gives you such flexibility that you can set the renewal interval time to daily, monthly, or yearly.
☑️ Another good thing is this plugin supports multilingualism. So it can provide service to your wide range of customers.
☑️ The plugin offers email services to its users. Auto-generated emails will ease your burden of keeping in touch with customers manually.
3. Subscriptio: Premium WooCommerce Subscription Plugin
Subscriptio is a premium subscription plugin for WooCommerce that can be used to sell products such as online memberships, e-learning packages, magazine subscriptions, and many more. Just right after your customers’ purchases any subscription, Subscriptio started tracking every activity of your users to give you insights about your customers.
Exclusive Features Available With This Plugin
☑️ This plugin will help you in processing automated payments for your subscribers.
☑️ You will get full control over your customers’ subscriptions. You can turn off renewal at any time.
☑️ With Subscriptio you will get management tools to handle your subscribers more efficiently.
☑️ This plugin is seamlessly integrated with Paypal and Stripe payment gateways.
4. SUMO Subscriptions: Popular WooCommerce Subscription System
SUMO Subscriptions is an all-in-one subscription solution for managing subscriptions of your WooCommerce online store. This plugin allows you to set up simple, variable, and grouped subscriptions to products. Furthermore, subscription products can be created and sold from a WooCommerce store.
Key Features Of Sumo Subscription
☑️ With SUMO Subscriptions, you can create simple, variable, or group subscription plans for your customers.
☑️ This plugin gives its users the utmost flexibility to select the subscription duration and number of renewals for each order.
☑️ You can add the option of manual subscription using any WooCommerce supported Payment Gateway.
☑️ Sumo Subscriptions always make sure their recent version is updated with WooCommerce and WordPress updates.
5. MemberPress: An All-Inclusive Membership Plugin
MemberPress is one of the popular WooCommerce subscription alternatives for those wanting to create a membership site that does not require a WooCommerce store. This is an excellent membership plugin that comes with so many exclusive features that are hard to find in any plugin that exists as an extension to WooCommerce.
This WooCommerce alternative lets your members create, update, and cancel subscriptions directly from their member area. By utilizing an automated billing system, there’s no complex setup. MemberPress automatically grants or revokes access to members based on the payments.
Exclusive MemberPress Features
☑️ Just following simple steps, you can set up MemberPress into your WordPress dashboard to manage your online store subscription.
☑️ One of the exclusive features of MemberPress is content dripping and content access expiration.
☑️ Membership allows you to restrict access to almost any file in your WordPress installation, including posts, pages, categories, tags, and widgets.
☑️ This plugin generates day-to-day reports to all your subscriptions, it will help you in making future decisions, improving conversions, and many more.
Tips & Tricks For Creating A Successful WooCommerce Subscriptions Model
There is no single formula for building a successful business model. It’s a continuous process of following established strategies that are maintained by others. Take a look at the best practices suggested by industry leaders.
Choose A Reasonable Pricing To Cover Most Targets
When you plan to offer a subscription service for your WooCommerce store, one of your primary concerns would be how to price it.
You can design a pricing strategy based on the functionalities or usage levels of your products.
Acquire Customers By Investing In Multi-Channel Solutions
When setting up a subscription business you must focus on customer acquisition. This is especially relevant now that more customers are using their mobile devices to do their online shopping. If your site is not optimized to offer a seamless experience across all devices, you may lose out on potential sales. Luckily, WooCommerce has a range of responsive themes that ensure subscriptions are handled smoothly.
Handle Billing & Invoicing Professionally
Invoicing your customers accurately and providing professional invoices is essential no matter what business model or eCommerce platform you use. Your subscription management solution should be able to handle all these different scenarios.
If you don’t include creative and thoughtful branding elements on your invoices, you are missing out on great marketing opportunities. However, there is great flexibility in WooCommerce to customize invoices and other documents for regular products.
Acquire Customers By Investing In Multi-Channel Solutions
Collecting subscription payments from subscribers is another important aspect of the business model. You can go for automatic recurring billing to stay hassle-free by integrating with different payment gateways for WooCommerce stores.
Additionally, payment gateways are geographically limited. When choosing a gateway for your subscription business, you should take this into concern as well. You need to know which payment gateways work in specific areas if you are trying to reach international customers. You should also make sure your WooCommerce Checkout page is fully functional and responsive on all devices. In this way, you can develop a process that covers your entire subscriber base.
Embrace The Importance Of Customer Relationships
Renewals, upgrades, suspensions, etc. might be part of common customer queries in a subscription business. If you want to manage your subscription business, you need a professional customer relationship management tool. Fortunately, if you run a store that is powered by WooCommerce, you have plenty of options.
Final Thoughts
A great way to boost sales from your online store is by adding subscriptions. The fact that they bring in recurring revenue is appealing. Furthermore, the subscription business model provides a better chance to understand your customers, which enables you to create more customer-friendly products and bundles.
WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin is one of the best available options when it comes to trying to offer subscriptions on your store. By focusing on your target audience and staying loyal to your customers, you can easily build a great subscription model.
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