Selling subscriptions (overview)
An overview of how to sell recurring subscription products with WooCommerce, including what's needed and how it works.
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
Subscriptions let customers pay you on a recurring basis — weekly, monthly, annually, or any schedule you choose. This is ideal for memberships, box subscriptions, software access, and any product or service that repeats.
Quick summary
WooCommerce does not include subscriptions by default. You need the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, which is paid. It adds a Subscriptions tab to your products, automatic recurring billing, and a Subscriptions area in the customer's account. Your payment gateway must also support automatic recurring charges. WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal Payments, Square and Authorize.net all do. Customers need an account to buy a subscription — guest checkout isn't an option for them.
What you need to sell subscriptions
Required
- WooCommerce Subscriptions (official paid extension, sold on the Woo Marketplace)
- A payment gateway that supports automatic recurring payments — WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal Payments, Square and Authorize.net all do
- Customer accounts, since subscriptions can't be bought as a guest
Optional but useful
- WooCommerce Memberships — a separate extension for restricting content and giving members perks, which can grant membership when someone buys a subscription
- Gifting, so a shopper can buy a subscription for someone else
How subscriptions work
You create a subscription plan. Edit an ordinary product and open the Subscriptions tab in the Product data section. Under Purchase options, choose whether the product is sold on a subscription, as a one-time purchase, or both. Then set the frequency, price, and any free trial or signup fee.
A customer subscribes. They go through checkout like any normal order. Their payment details are saved with your payment gateway.
Automatic renewal billing. On the renewal date, Subscriptions charges the customer's saved payment method through your gateway. No action needed from you.
You manage subscriptions. Under WooCommerce → Subscriptions you can see every subscription and its status. From an individual subscription you can suspend or cancel it, change the trial end date, add products, shipping, fees or taxes, or adjust the recurring total for future payments.
Customers manage their own subscriptions. From My Account → Subscriptions they can cancel or suspend, change their payment method, update addresses, pay a renewal, resubscribe, and switch plans — depending on which of those you've enabled.
How subscription products are set up
Since WooCommerce Subscriptions 9.0, the recommended approach is subscription plans on ordinary products. You set them on the Subscriptions tab of a simple, variable, bundle or composite product, and Purchase options gives you three choices:
| Purchase option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Use storewide subscription plans | Applies plans you defined once under WooCommerce → Settings → Subscriptions — either all of them, or a selection |
| Create custom subscription plans | Defines plans just for this product |
| Sell one time only | No subscription; the product is a normal one-off purchase |
When you use plans, a One-time purchases section appears with a single checkbox, "Customers can buy this product without subscribing," so you can offer both.
Simple subscription and Variable subscription still exist
These are the older, dedicated product types. WooCommerce keeps them for backward compatibility and for cases plans don't cover yet, and existing products using them keep working. You can hide them from the product type dropdown under WooCommerce → Settings → Subscriptions → Subscription product creation. If you're starting fresh, use plans.
Pricing options for subscription plans
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Frequency | A number plus a period (day, week, month, year) — "every 3 months", for example. The combination can't exceed ten years |
| Price | Either Discount product price (the product's regular price, minus an optional percentage or fixed discount) or Set a custom price independent of the product price |
| Align renewal | Optionally line up every subscriber's renewal on the same day, instead of their own purchase date |
| Free trial | A duration in days, weeks, months or years before billing starts |
| Signup fee | A one-time fee customers pay when they first subscribe |
| Subscription expiration | By default subscriptions renew until cancelled. Tick Expire after a set number of payments and set Total payments to end them — that count includes the initial purchase |
Handling subscription management
Test thoroughly before going live
Subscription billing involves automatic charges and saved payment details. Test the full flow — sign up, renewal, cancellation, and refund — using your payment gateway's sandbox mode before accepting real customers.
What you can do from the Subscriptions screen:
- View every subscription and its status
- See the start date, trial end, next payment date and end date
- Change a subscription's status
- Each renewal creates its own order in WooCommerce → Orders, so you refund one the way you'd refund any order
- Change the recurring total, or add products, shipping, fees or taxes for future payments
Subscription statuses are Pending, Active, On-hold, Pending-Cancellation, Cancelled and Expired.
Cancelled and Expired are one-way doors
Neither you nor the customer can reactivate a cancelled subscription, and expired ones can't be reactivated either. The customer has to buy again. A Suspend (On-hold) is the reversible option; a cancellation isn't.
Common questions
What does WooCommerce Subscriptions cost?
It's a paid extension sold on the Woo Marketplace. Check woocommerce.com for current pricing. Woo Marketplace purchases are sold as a subscription you can buy for one year or two, and it covers updates and support while it's active — if it lapses, the extension keeps working but stops receiving updates and support. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Can customers pause their subscription?
Yes, if you switch it on. The setting is Enable subscriber suspensions under WooCommerce → Settings → Subscriptions. With it on, customers can suspend an active subscription from their My Account page, and you can optionally cap how many times they may do so per billing period. You can always suspend a subscription yourself from the admin, whatever the setting says.
What happens if a recurring payment fails?
By default, nothing is retried — the renewal order is marked failed and the customer is emailed a renewal invoice to pay.
WooCommerce Subscriptions includes an automatic retry system, but it's off by default. Turn it on at WooCommerce → Settings → Subscriptions, in the Payment recovery card, by ticking Enable automatic retry of failed recurring payments. Once it's on, a failed renewal is retried several times over about a week, the subscription sits On-hold in between, and the customer and you get emails at set points. If every retry fails, the renewal order is marked failed and the customer gets the renewal invoice email.
We'd recommend turning this on. Recovering a temporarily declined card is far cheaper than winning the customer back.
Can I offer a discount for annual vs. monthly subscriptions?
Yes. Set up two subscription plans on the same product — a monthly one and a yearly one — and give the yearly plan a discount, either as a percentage off the product price or as a custom price. You can also do it with a variable product if each option needs its own variation.
Related guides
- WooCommerce extensions explained
- Payment methods explained
- Accepting credit cards (Stripe & more)
- Selling bookings & appointments (overview)
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