Start offering subscriptions in your store with WooCommerce Subscriptions.
March 14, 2021

Start offering subscriptions in your store with WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with WooCommerce Subscriptions

We started using WooCommerce Subscriptions as a way to enhance our store offerings and better manage data month to month. We are a subscription box company and of the different options out there, this one seemed like the most cost-effective way to do what we wanted without giving up a significant portion of sales to an outside party. The learning curve is reasonable and there is a lot of documentation about how to set things up properly. There are some quirks in functionality and if you want to get very serious about a WooCommerce site, you can hire a developer, but I've found we can accomplish about 90% of what we are hoping for with this service.
  • Recurring billing
  • Connecting to external platforms
  • Access to data through API
  • Reasonable variety of options
  • Better subscription changing functionality
  • Better tracking of subscription details and reporting
  • More control over data with subscriptions, especially metadata
  • Year over year subscriber growth
  • Annual revenue growth
  • Options to expand in the future
WooCommerce Subscriptions is more robust than Cratejoy in every way but Cratejoy is a prepackaged solution that you don't have to build. If you have the time and patience, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the much better way to go because you would be cutting out the extremely high fees that Cratejoy charges per transaction in their marketplace and you would be setting yourself up for growth in the future as you continue to develop your own store.

Do you think WooCommerce Subscriptions delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with WooCommerce Subscriptions's feature set?

Yes

Did WooCommerce Subscriptions live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of WooCommerce Subscriptions go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy WooCommerce Subscriptions again?

Yes

Of the options out there for offering subscriptions, this one is one of the best. Setting up a store is relatively straightforward, if a little time-consuming, and you can always expand it over time. Theoretically, you can accomplish a lot of very complicated things with WooCommerce Subscriptions itself and there are many ways to enhance it like plugins or custom code. The times where it falls short though are in handling metadata for orders and subscriptions. It has taken a long time just to understand how the process works and now that I do, I have developed a unique system outside of WooCommerce to handle the data I need. In reality, it would be very simple for WooCommerce to offer this data in reports within the Admin system already. Compiling reports on active subscriptions and tallying products and metadata from orders and subscriptions is simple when you are doing it inside the platform. Overall the system works well and comparing it to other options it still holds up as one of the best at the moment. Why pay selling fees when you can just have your own store?

WooCommerce Subscriptions Support

The support I've received has always been timely and mostly helpful. I have found that they are not always able to offer the perfect solution and may direct you to a developer at times depending on the complexity of your inquiry.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No. I guess I've never thought about it. I'm not really familiar with what it costs or what you get for it.
I was having difficulty with my subscriptions not renewing automatically and they walked me through fixing the problem in great detail. I had modified settings that affected the system without realizing it but their support team helped me to resolve the issue quickly and get my store back on track.

Using WooCommerce Subscriptions

I like almost everything about WooCommerce Subscriptions EXCEPT one of the main reasons we started using it has never worked out. When we started this subscription box company, I discovered that it was difficult to track how many of each unique product we needed to order to fulfill subscriptions. In my naivete, I thought it was a simple task . 4 years later, I have recently developed my own custom solution (after learning 5 different programming languages) and I now use the WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions API to get the data I need from the store en masse.

Basically, I offer multiple selections that customers can make as part of their subscriptions. WooCommerce does not offer totals or reports for anything up that is not tracked using a 'variation ID' which you have to manually generate. My products have 80 or so variations per product sometimes and the WooCommerce system was actually a little buggy when I tried setting them all up at once so I gave up. Now I know that without that info, the selections in orders are treated as metadata and handled almost as if they are not relevant to the order.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • Offering robust subscription products
  • Recurring billing
  • Order processing
  • Reporting metadata
  • Subscription Switching functionality