Subscriptions are no longer limited to Netflix, Hulu, and other similar content streaming platforms alone – they’ve become a part of our lives, as more and more companies choose this payment model to offer their services.

According to McKinsey, 15% of online shoppers have signed up for one or more subscription-based services to receive various services on a recurring basis. And since there are an expected 2 billion online shoppers in the world, 15% of it cuts across a vast industry.

So if you too want to sell a service or a product, better to sell it with recurring payments through a subscription site. And fortunately, setting up a subscription site is easier than you think, thanks to WooCommerce and WordPress.

In this article, we’ll take a look at all things related to it, including how you can set up a WooCommerce based subscription site easily. Let’s begin!

Why WooCommerce Is a Good Platform to Handle Recurring Payments

WooCommerce by itself allows you to set up products that can be purchased using a single time payment. To set up recurring payments on WooCommerce, you need to use an extension called WooCommerce Subscriptions.

It is a WooCommerce official extension, so you don’t need to worry about its compatibility with the platform – it’ll work seamlessly with any WooCommerce WordPress theme or plugins you may be using.

In addition to that, it’s also much affordable in comparison to the other 3rd party solutions developed for the same purpose as it costs only $199 annually.

Let’s see how to set it up.

Steps to Install and Setup WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugin

The first step to set up the plugin is, of course, to purchase it. Once that’s done, here’s how it can be installed and set up:

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins >> Add New.
2. On the Add New page, type and Search for WooCommerce Subscriptions. Once you find it in the search results, hit the Install button.
3. Once the plugin has been installed, you’ll see an ‘Activate’ button in place of the Install button. Click it to activate the plugin.

You’ve installed and activated the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension. In the next few steps, we’ll tell you how to set up a subscription product using it.

Here we go:

Steps to Set Up a Subscription Product

• In the left column of your WordPress dashboard, click Products >> Add product.
• You’ll find a section similar to the one shown below on your Product creation page. This section is where you define the various parameters of your subscription product. Scroll down to this section.

• The first step is to select whether you want to set up a Simple subscription or a Variable subscription. In simple subscriptions, you can create just one variation of your subscriptions, while in Variable subscriptions, you can create different variations based on various attributes. You select between both these options from a dropdown menu available.

• The next step is to set up a price. The Subscription Price section under the General category allows you to do that. Just enter your desired price, select the payment schedule (i.e., every month, every 3rd month, every year, etc.), and add a sign-up fee if you want to add it. You can also define the period of a free trial if you’re going to offer free trials.

• If you’re creating a Variable subscription, you can also create variations of your subscription with different prices, sign-up fees, and payment frequency.

• Next, you need to define the shipping options. Navigate to the ‘Shipping’ tab and configure the shipping options. The options will be similar to native shipping options of WooCommerce. Enter the details for the attributes of the product as specified. With subscriptions, you can choose to charge shipping only once during the lifetime of a customer.

• WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin also supports coupon codes. If you want to offer some coupon codes to your customers, you can configure them by navigating to the WooCommerce >> Coupons section. If you’ve never used coupons before now, you, first of all, need to enable Coupon functionality by going to WooCommerce >> Settings >> General >> Enable Coupons.

You can manage all subscriptions to your products under WooCommerce >> Subscriptions section. Relevant actions can also be taken against any subscriptions or customers from here.

Conclusion

So that’s how you can set up a recurring payments subscription site on WordPress and WooCommerce by using the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. It’s simple to set up the plugin itself, and even simpler to set up subscription products with recurring billing.

If you still have any questions about it, please leave them in the comments below, and we’ll try to answer them. And if you’ve found this article helpful, do share it with others to help them out too!

The post How to Setup A Recurring Payments Based Subscription Site on WooCommerce appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

You’re looking to book flight tickets online. You make the mistake of not purchasing them right away and *boom* a couple of days or sometimes hours later, the prices have gone up.

Altering prices based on demand or customers is a common strategy that several businesses use to drive sales or maximize profits.

In e-commerce, this is officially known as dynamic pricing.

What Is Dynamic Pricing?

A concept that’s been around for a while. Dynamic pricing is when the price of a product or service is adjusted (increased or decreased) for a specific period of time to meet demand or to influence a purchase.

The price of the product could be changed temporarily for various reasons – it could be hiked up during the holiday season. Or lowered to move out slow-moving inventory. Or could be personalized for wholesale buyers or business partners. Using price scraping software would ultimately allow you to determine the optimal price for your product or services.

With dynamic pricing, you can set the best price for your offering to maximize your profit.

How Can Dynamic Pricing Benefit Your WooCommerce Store?

E-commerce giants like Amazon, airline ticket booking sites, and popular hotels are known to implement dynamic pricing on a regular basis. That’s because the advantage of dynamic pricing is the opportunity to increase sales.

Along with this, there are several underlying benefits, such as:

1. Increased Purchase Urgency: You can convince potential buyers to make purchases quicker with limited time offers. If the price is dropped momentarily then the urgency to make the purchase increases.
2. Marketing Opportunity: Change in prices can be marketed to your target audience to lure them into making a purchase. You can also use this to coax customers into becoming members.
3. Customer Loyalty: By setting special prices for customers, you can make them feel special and keep them coming back to your store; thus, increasing loyalty.
4. Product Highlighting: By altering prices of certain products or product categories you can bring them into focus. This can primarily help you clear out stagnant inventory.
5. Price Personalization: Prices set for customers or certain user roles or groups can be used to offer buyers a personalized shopping experience.

Dynamic pricing allows you to have more control over the pricing of your product. Changes in pricing can be managed effectively without having a negative impact on your brand.

How to Implement Dynamic Pricing on WooCommerce?

There are several dynamic pricing extensions available to help you implement and control this strategy on your WooCommerce store. Using one or a combination of these extensions you can set flexible pricing in several ways. For example:

1. User-Based Pricing

With this strategy prices are set per user. This could be setting a different cost for the same product for guest buyers or setting personalized prices per customer. This works when you have a few products in your e-store.

However, dynamic pricing extensions also allow you to set prices for multiple products and customers at once using price import options.

For example, product A costs $30 for guest buyers. $20 for customer XYZ. $10 for customer JKL.

2. Advanced Category Pricing

Percentage price discounts can be set for an entire category. However, with an advanced strategy, special discounts can be set per customer for a category. This strategy works particularly well to clear out slow-moving inventory.

For example, product category A is available at a 10% discount for customer XYZ.

3. Role-Based Pricing

With role-based pricing, you can create a sort of membership store wherein customers have greater cost-saving benefits as they move up the membership ladder.

You can set different price discounts for different roles. This can also be implemented if you want to club vendor partners into a single role and offer them special discounts.

For example, all products at 10% OFF for Shop Managers.

4. Quantity-Based Pricing

Specifically for wholesale buyers, this strategy can also be put into place for regular customers to coax them into making a higher-quantity purchase. By setting increasingly higher discounts for bulk orders, you can give customers a benefit for purchasing in bulk.

For example, get 1 x product A at $30. 5 x product A at $20 (each). 10 x product A at $10 (each).

5. Dynamic Cart Discounts

When a customer adds a product to the cart, you can push them to increase their order value by offering them a special price or discount on crossing a certain cart value limit. This can drive them to purchase more products in the lure of better savings.

For example, let’s say a customer has products worth $90 in their cart. You can offer a 10% savings upon reaching a cart value of $100.

6. Demand-Driven Pricing

Holiday seasons are a great time when you see an increase in product demand. For example, the price of airline tickets or hotel rooms increases as the demand goes up. Setting prices in such scenarios can help you stretch your profit margins.

Moving Ahead

Quite simply put, dynamic pricing is a strategy that can drive success to any business.

What’s important is to figure out the most suitable option for your products or services and your customer base. Having the right plugin gives you the flexibility to implement either of the above strategies to help you boost returns. Be sure to keep tracking your competitor prices so as to maintain rates as per your industry standards.

What do you think of the strategies discussed? Is there a particular one that you’d like to try? Whether it’s a single strategy or multiple combined, it’s time to take the plunge and implement dynamic pricing on your WooCommerce store, right away!

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