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Recurring orders are an excellent way to boost your revenue and make it more reliable.
These plugins have a ton of functionality for recurring orders and can be used for various purposes.
For example, you can use a plugin here to sell a monthly subscription box, a club membership to offer products to members only, or a membership site with gated content.
It only depends on which plugin you choose.
Recurring order plugins
Since the vast majority of WooCommerce stores sell products for a one-time fee, there aren’t a ton of options for subscription payments.
That said, the plugins here the best available for handling subscriptions and orders that will be placed on a routine basis.
Here are the top recurring order plugins for WooCommerce.
1. YITH WooCommerce Subscription
Plugin Description
YITH WooCommerce Subscription is the best and most robust plugin for creating recurring orders with WooCommerce. It works well for recurring orders and is perfectly suited for monthly subscription boxes and similar products.
With this plugin activated, you can turn any product into a subscription instead. On the product page, the customer will be able to select a plan (if you have multiple tiers) and click a “Subscribe” button instead of the normal “Add to cart” button. Once they complete their purchase, they’ll be charged every month until they cancel their plan, which they can do anytime via their member account page.
This plugin has a huge number of features, so I’ll highlight a few of the most important ones here. First, you get a new menu to view all of your customers’ subscriptions, including active and canceled. You can schedule deliveries based on when each customer’s subscription renews, and you also have the option to synchronize all the subscription renewals to the same day of the month for management purposes. This plugin also includes a whole new set of triggered email notifications to update customers about their subscription status, and you can send custom notices if something with their payment goes wrong.
Creating recurring orders with WooCommerce requires a lot of functionality, and this plugin nails it. There are many more features I haven’t covered yet, and you can read about them by clicking the “Learn More” link below.
2. WooCommerce Subscriptions
Plugin Description
WooCommerce Subscriptions is one of the first plugins you should consider if you want to add recurring payments to your eCommerce store. It has all the essential functionality you need to get this feature working.
With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can offer free trials and charge one-time signup fees for any subscription. You can also use variable products with subscriptions allowing a product to have multiple pricing tiers. If you use this option, users can upgrade or downgrade their payments anytime via their account dashboard. This plugin also handles pro-rating very well so that users only get charged based on the days left in their subscription if they upgrade mid-month.
Another cool option in WooCommerce Subscriptions is the ability to charge daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also make the product downloadable instead of physical if you’d like.
While popular, this subscription plugin has been getting mixed reviews for a while now. It seems that it works well initially, but many users are reporting trouble after the first year of using it. This seems to be mostly due to the developers’ bad design choices that lead users to set up the plugin incorrectly. That said, the development team has been updating it almost every month and may have fixed the issues users complained about.
3. SUMO Subscriptions
Plugin Description
SUMO Subscriptions is complex but comprehensive. It may take you longer to get this plugin configured properly on your website, but you’re unlikely to find it missing any features you need, and it is a fraction of the cost of similar solutions.
With SUMO Subscriptions, you can create as many recurring subscription products as you’d like. It works with variable products and grouped products, has Stripe and PayPal support built-in, and works with any other WooCommerce payment gateway. It handles pro-rating well, synchronizes subscription payments to the same day, includes free trials and signup fees, and much more.
There are lots of other handy features tucked into this plugin too. For example, customers can purchase multiple subscriptions at once, buy subscription products and normal products in the same checkout, you can require manual approval from customers before renewals, and there’s even an option to limit the number of renewals or length of any subscription.
This plugin has complex menus that might take you longer to set up recurring orders, but it could be a great value compared to other available solutions.
4. YITH WooCommerce Memberships
Plugin Description
The plugins listed above all work great for selling subscriptions to products that need to be delivered, whether they’re physical or digital. This plugin is better for selling subscriptions that give customers access to digital content, including video courses and downloads.
With YITH WooCommerce Memberships, you can make content on your website private so that only paying members can view it. There are a lot of techniques offered by the plugin to make this possible. You can make entire posts and pages “members-only,” or insert a line in the content where readers have to subscribe to keep reading, or you can insert blocks that show different content for registered members. You can also have free members and paid members on the site. It might be a good idea to give people some additional content for free if they register before requiring payment.
One caveat with this plugin is that it only works with one-time payments. Members can repurchase their subscription if they want, and you can even send a renewal email notification, but the sale won’t process automatically. If you want to use automatic subscription payments, this plugin integrates perfectly with the YITH subscriptions plugin reviewed above here.
5. WooCommerce Memberships
Plugin Description
If you already know your way around WooCommerce then this plugin is going to be a good choice for your membership website. You can create new memberships as products and get full control over exactly what content is restricted.
One feature you might really appreciate is the ability to create a “club” website like Costco or Sam’s Club. You can restrict access to your products so that members need to pay a club fee to join and get access to your products. It’s a neat idea and one that I hadn’t considered before. Alternatively, you can restrict access to specific posts, pages, or categories of content on your website.
For the price, this plugin is a bit light on features, so you may want to consider one of these membership plugins if you’re going to use this strategy for your recurring orders. The main complaint from users is that it doesn’t include subscription payments which require purchasing the subscription plugin listed above here.
Which subscription plugin is best?
Which plugin should you choose?
YITH WooCommerce Subscriptions is the top recommendation because it works so well for physical product subscriptions. The flexibility to create multi-tiered subscriptions, synchronize payments, and control every email notification makes it a full-featured solution for recurring orders.
Thanks for reading this collection of the best WooCommerce plugins for recurring orders. If you found a great new plugin for your website, share it with someone else too!
