Subscriptions Feature Roadmap

WooCommerce Subscriptions is actively in development. This roadmap provides a guide to the current development plan. It’s provided to show which version a new feature will be introduced or when a particular feature was introduced. It also includes information about underlying changes for developers and potential upcoming behavior changes for existing features.

As a general rule, patch versions, such as 2.6.2 and 2.6.3, are released more frequently (fortnightly/monthly) with bug fixes, while major new features are introduced infrequently in new minor and major versions, e.g. 2.3, 2.4 or 3.0.

Upcoming

Future plans for WooCommerce Subscriptions include:

• Adding a feature which enables having differing shipping and billing schedules. For example, charge monthly but ship yearly and other configurations.
• Integrating with WooCommerce Admin.

Subscriptions is in active development and other bug fixes and enhancements are in the works as well, but these are the major planned upcoming features.

Version 3.0

Subscriptions 3.0 was released on January 6, 2020.

Version 3.0 is a major release that includes updates to the Action Scheduler library and data migration.

• Updating Action Scheduler to increase throughput and scalability. Action Scheduler is the library used by Subscriptions that handles scheduling and running timed actions.
• Subscription and order status visual updates on admin screens.

Version 2.6

Subscriptions 2.6 was released on September 2, 2019.

2.6 included 2 features, 2 enhancements, and other fixes and updates.

• Improved early renewal experience with a modal. Customers can now use a modal to complete their early renewal or choose to go through checkout.
• View which subscriptions and orders contribute to report figures. In the reports screen, managers can click on the report figure and be taken to a table with the subscriptions and orders that contribute to that figure.
• Switching calculations were improved, fixing a number of switching-related bugs.
• Improved handling of unloadable orders in the related orders table. Orders that for a reason cannot be loaded in the related orders table will now have the number listed and a link to documentation.

Version 2.5

Subscriptions 2.5 was released on February 6, 2019.

2.5 is a feature release that introduced 2 new features and a few enhancements. Some of these include:

• Allowing customers to sign up to free trial and synced products without payment details.
• A customer-facing auto-renew toggle. This will allow customers to turn on and off automatic renewal payments from their My Account page.
• A new option when customers change a subscription’s payment method which will allow them to update all their subscriptions to use this new payment method.
• Improved payment method details displayed on the customer’s View Subscriptions page.

Version 2.4

Subscriptions 2.4 was released on October 9, 2018.

2.4 is a maintenance and architecture release and as such, no features were released as part of this version. Some of the notable changes include:

• Moving failed payment retry data out of the posts and post meta tables and into a custom table.
• Subscriptions now requires WooCommerce versions above 3.0 to be installed on the site.
• Separating a subscription’s start date from its creation date.
• Implementing an autoloader to include our plugin files.

Version 2.3

Subscriptions version 2.3 was released in July 2018.

A few of the most popular feature requests were included in it:

• a feature to define the number of cycles a recurring coupon discounts. For example, a $10 coupon may be used to discount only the first 3 months of a 12 month subscription.
• a way to charge the full recurring payments for a synchronized subscription product at the time of sign-up
• allow customers to renew a subscription early.

On the original roadmap was also a feature to provide a shipping schedule that differs to the billing schedule, which makes it possible to sell subscription products that, for example, ship monthly but are charged annually. Due to the size of this feature, it was removed from this version. This feature is still in development for a future version.

Version 2.2

Version 2.2. of Subscriptions was entirely dedicated to WooCommerce 3.0 compatibility. It did not introduce any requested features, and instead began the process to migrate the codebase to the new CRUD architecture.

Version 2.1

Version 2.1 of Subscriptions introduced:

• Automatic retry system for failed renewal payments (dunning).
• Advanced subscription reports, including reporting on:
  • Subscriber churn
  • Average subscriber lifetime value
  • Revenue forecasts based on upcoming renewals
  • Retention curve for the life of your subscribers
• New subscription emails to notify store managers when:
  • a subscription expires
  • a renewal payment fails
  • a subscription is suspended by the subscriber

Subscriptions v2.1 is now now available.

Version 2.0

• Purchase multiple different subscription products in the same transaction (for payment gateways which support it). Note: it’s already possible for a customer to purchase multiple subscriptions, they just need to checkout separately for each subscription.
• New Add/Edit Subscription administration screen for manually adding or changing a subscription’s details – rather than having to do it from the Edit Order screen.
• For developers: a new subscription object, to replace the current subscription array, making it much easier to get the details of a subscription. The subscription key identifier will also be deprecated in favor of a real ID.
• For developers: subscription endpoints for the WooCommerce REST API

Version 2.0 is now available. Learn more about all the new features introduced in version 2.0 in the What’s New in Subscriptions v2.0 document.

Version 1.5

• Purchase multiple products and a subscription in the same checkout.
• Payment date sync – align payment/expiration dates automatically.
• Support quantities – instead of forcing subscription products to be sold individually, allow a customer to choose the quantity to purchase.
• New Subscription Switched emails.
• New Scheduling System to allow for payment date synchronization which potentially needs to process a queue of thousands of payments due at the same time.

Version 1.5 is now available!

Version 1.4

• Complete database restructure to remove performance bottlenecks for sites with 5,000+ subscriptions
• Upgrade/downgrade subscriptions from one product to another
• Change payment method on a subscription
• Subscription specific emails using the WooCommerce 2.0 Email API to allow for customization and modification of subscription related emails
• New Subscription Cancelled email send to store managers
• Improve memory usage by working with the WooCommerce 2.0 dynamic payment gateway loading system
• Payment date sync (aligning payment/expiration dates automatically)¹

Version 1.4 is now available!

1. This feature was postponed due to scaling issues. Processing hundreds or thousands of payments at the same time required a completely new scheduling system.

Other Features

All development is driven by the needs of store managers just like you. If you want a feature not included here, please visit the WooCommerce Ideas forum and either vote up an existing request or add a new request for the feature.

Caveat

This roadmap should be used as a guide only. Software development is a complex undertaking and occasionally a feature which may look at the outset to be only a few days work can turn into weeks or even months of development time. To compound the difficulty in estimation, difficult bugs are occasionally reported which can take weeks or months to fix, which is time which was intended to be spent on new feature development. As a result, release dates may be pushed back or features may be pushed back to later versions to allow for the release of features which have already been developed.