You’re selling craft materials which you ship to your customers in a themed subscription box at the beginning of each month. Some of your customers have approached you about purchasing a box for their grandchild/niece/nephew.

Products Used for this Use Case

• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting

Setup and Configuration

Install Gifting for WooCommerce Subscriptions.

• Download the extension from your WooCommerce dashboard.
• Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload and select the ZIP file you just downloaded.
• Click Install Now, and then Activate.

Customer’s View

Your customers can now purchase your craft subscription boxes for their loved ones. In this scenario, we’re going to imagine a customer is purchasing a box for Jane.

By purchasing the subscription for Jane, both Jane and your customer can now manage her subscription from their My Account pages where they can suspend, reactivate, change address etc.

Jane’s (Recipient’s) View

Because Jane didn’t have an account with your store before your customer purchased this product for her, an account will be automatically created so she can manage the subscription.

Jane will receive an email about the purchases made for her and an email with the account login details. The first time Jane logs in, she will be prompted to fill out some account details where she can set her shipping address and change her password.

Once her account is set up, she can view and manage her subscription from her My Account View Subscription page.

The post Subscriptions Use Case: Gifting a Subscription Box first appeared on CODIBU.

You’re selling industry news content which you distribute each month to professionals in your industry. Some companies have approached you about signing up some of their employee’s to receive your content.

Products Used for this Use Case

• WooCommerce
• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting

Setup and Configuration

Install Gifting for WooCommerce Subscriptions.

1. Download the extension from your WooCommerce dashboard.
2. Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload and select the ZIP file you just downloaded.
3. Click Install Now, and then Activate.

Configure the plugin to use wording more suited to the corporate purchasing use case.

1. Go to: WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions.
2. Scroll down to Gifting Subscriptions.
3. Modify the Gifting checkbox text setting it to something like “Purchase for an employee“
4. Save changes.

Corporate Buyer’s View

Your customers can now purchase your industry news content for their themselves and their employees.

By purchasing the subscription for Jane, John, and themselves your customer, Jane, and John can now manage their individual subscriptions from their My Account pages where they can also download your content.

Employee (Recipient’s) View

Because John didn’t have an account with your store, an account will be automatically created so he can manage the subscription.

John will receive an email about the purchases made for him and an email with the account login details. The first time John logs in, he will be prompted to fill out some account details where he can change his password.

Once his account is set up, he can view and manage his subscription from his My Account > View Subscription page.  He can also download digital copies of the news items here.

The post Subscriptions Use Case: Corporate Purchasing first appeared on CODIBU.

You’ve always wanted to roast your own beans. You love the smell of coffee in the morning so much that you’ve started a store selling your coffee creations. You now want to offer your roasts on subscription, but need a bit of flexibility as your business is growing quickly:

• You have learned that you can acquire more customers if you make your beans available both as a one-time purchase and on subscription.
• You need to start managing your inventory of coffee beans more accurately: One-time purchases and subscription deliveries of a coffee bean variety should pull stock from the same SKU.
• In addition to selling coffee beans individually, you would love to offer them in a pick-and-mix bundle. Customers will be able to personalize its contents according to their taste and, optionally, purchase it on subscription.
• Finally, you would like to give your bundle subscribers the freedom to change the contents of their bundle.

In short, you want to build a state-of-the-art subscription box store with WooCommerce. Here’s how to do it!

Required Plugins/Extensions

WooCommerce Subscriptions is the perfect tool for selling recurring products or services, as it can reliably manage thousands of active subscriptions for you. However, there are a couple things it can’t do out-of-the-box:

1. It does not allow the same product to be offered both as a one-time purchase and on subscription.

Depending on the kind of Subscription Box you want to sell, some customers may not be willing to commit to a subscription before they’ve had a chance to try what you offer. To work around this limitation, you could create another WooCommerce product and offer that as a one-time purchase. However, doing so will unnecessarily complicate inventory management for you.

2. It works only with dedicated Subscription product types.

WooCommerce Subscriptions introduces a new Subscription product type that lets you define a billing schedule for your recurring product/service. It also allows you to create Variable Subscription products with multiple subscription options and/or configurable attributes. However, a Subscription Box usually consists of multiple products that need to be inventory-managed individually. This is a complex problem that can’t be solved with WooCommerce Subscriptions alone.

While these limitations won’t necessarily prevent you from building a Subscription Box store with WooCommerce Subscriptions, they can complicate things as your business grows. That’s where All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooCommerce Product Bundles come in handy:

All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions is a WooCommerce Subscriptions add-on that allows you to add subscription plans to existing products. To purchase a product on subscription, customers may choose a plan before clicking the Add to Cart button. You can also use it to:

• Purchase entire carts on subscription.
• Add products to existing subscriptions.

WooCommerce Product Bundles allows you to create assembled products and customizable, pick-and-mix boxes. The extension has been around since the early days of WooCommerce and has been battle-tested on many high-traffic sites.

Here’s a complete list of plugins/extensions you’ll need to set up a Subscription Box store with WooCommerce:

• WooCommerce (free)
• WooCommerce Subscriptions
• All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions
• WooCommerce Product Bundles
• Storefront (free)

Configuration

Purchase and Install Extensions

To get started:

1. Purchase WooCommerce Subscriptions, All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooCommerce Product Bundles.
2. Download the 3 .zip files from your WooCommerce account.
3. Starting with WooCommerce Subscriptions, go to Plugins > Add New > Upload and select its .zip file.
4. Click Install Now, and then Activate.
5. Repeat for All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooCommerce Product Bundles.

Add Subscription Plans to Your Existing Products

Assuming you have already created the Spicy, Nutty, Fruity and Woody Beans products, here’s how you can offer them on subscription:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Products and locate the Spicy Beans product.
2. Edit the product.
3. Go to Product Data > Subscriptions.
4. Click Add Plan to add a subscription plan. Every plan you add here will create an option that customers can choose before adding the product to their cart.
5. Repeat the previous step to add more plans.
6. Optional: To provide an incentive for subscribing, consider offering a discount with each plan.
7. Update the product to save your changes.

Create a Product Bundle

To create a new Product Bundle:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Products and click Add Product.
2. Enter a Title, Description and Short Description.
3. Locate the Product Data panel and select the Product bundle type.

Then, add bundled products to it:

1. Go to the Bundled Products tab in the left menu.
2. Use the search field to find the Spicy Beans product.
3. Click on its title to add it.
4. Repeat to add the remaining Coffee Bean products to your Box.
5. To require customers to choose exactly 4 items, enter 4 in the Min Bundle Size and Max Bundle Size fields.

Next, configure pricing options. Customers should be free to choose any combination of 4 coffee bean packs, and pay for each pack individually:

1. Go to the General tab in the left menu and make sure that the Regular Price and Sale Price fields are blank.
2. Go to the Bundled Products tab. In the Basic Settings section of each bundled item, check the Priced Individually option.

Then, configure shipping options. The next steps assume that you are going to assemble the selected coffee bean packs in a special box you’ve built for this purpose:

1. Ensure that the Virtual option is unchecked.
2. Go to the Shipping tab on the left menu.
3. Enter the weight and dimensions of your box, and/or optionally assign a Shipping Class to it.
4. Go to the Bundled Products tab on the left menu.
5. Open/expand all bundled products and ensure that Shipped Individually is unchecked.

Add Subscription Plans to the Product Bundle

1. Go to WooCommerce > Products and locate the bundle you just created.
2. Edit the product.
3. Go to Product Data > Subscriptions.
4. Click Add Plan to add a subscription plan. Every plan you add here will create an option that customers can choose before adding the product to their cart.
5. Repeat the previous step to add more plans.
6. Optional: To provide an incentive for subscribing, consider offering a discount with each plan.
7. Update the product to save your changes.

Enable Switching for Subscription Plans and Bundles

1. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions.
2. Locate the Switching section.
3. Enable Allow Switching > Between Subscription Plans.

When this option is enabled, customers who view an active subscription from My Account > Subscriptions will see an Upgrade or Downgrade button next to every product with configurable content or multiple subscription plans.

When clicking this button, customers will be taken to the Subscription Box page, where they can choose a new configuration. Currently, it is only possible to modify the contents of a subscribed bundle — plan changes are not supported just yet.

Result

Now customers can:

1. Purchase your individual coffee bean packs one-time, or on subscription.

2. Purchase a personalized box with 4 coffee bean packs, one-time or on subscription.

3. Modify the contents of their personalized subscription box mid-term.

The post Subscriptions Use Case: Coffee Beans Subscription Box first appeared on CODIBU.

WooCommerce Subscriptions allows you to charge a signup fee, and that’s great if the subscription product you’re providing has a one-time setup cost. However, the signup fee is charged at the time of signup, irrespective of the trial period.

So, if your product offers a 1 week trial with a $300 signup fee, and the subscription costs $100/month, the customer would pay the $300 signup fee at the time of signup, and $100/month for the subscription starting a week later (i.e. after their trial period is over).

Now, imagine this use case: you offer a collection of home workout videos as a subscription on your site, along with home workout equipment.

You charge a one-time fee for the home workout equipment, but you want to give customers a week trial access to the videos, so that they feel confident using your equipment before they’re charged.

In this use case, you would be charging the one-time fee after their trial week is over. Let’s see how we can set this up.

Setup

We’ll call our product Fit at Home. The subscription videos cost $99/month, and the one-time fee for workout equipment is $300.

Required Extensions

1. WooCommerce Subscriptions
2. Product Bundles
3. WooCommerce Subscriptions – Custom Price String

Get Started

For this, we create 2 subscription products – 1 for the ongoing access to workout videos, and the other to charge the one-time fee after the free trial for the workout video ends.

Then we bundle them together so customers have to purchase only 1 product.

Create a subscription product for the workout videos

We’ll call this product Fit at Home. The product settings look like this:

The product is priced at $99 per month, and has a free trial of 7 days.

Create another subscription for the equipment

We’ll call this product Fit at Home – Equipment and its settings look like this:

Notice that this product is priced at $300/month, but is set to Expire After 1 month. That ensures customers are charged only once for the equipment.

The “Fit at Home – Equipment” product also has a trial period of 7 days. That’s to ensure customers are not charged at the time of signup.

And, finally, we have use the Custom Price String extension to set the price string for this product to $300 one time fee, to be charged at the end of 1 week trial. This lets customers know that they will only be charged once for the equipment, at the end of their trial.

Hide the two subscription products so that they can’t be purchased individually

For our use case, we want the customers to purchase the Fit at Home video subscription along with the equipment, since the workouts in these videos can’t be performed without the specialized equipment. We don’t want the 2 subscription products visible on the shop page, so we set their Catalog Visibility to Hidden.

To do this, head over to the product’s publish settings, and select the Hidden option under Catalog Visibility:

Be sure to set both products to Hidden.

Create a Bundled Product

We’ll call our bundled product Fit at Home – Workout Videos and Equipment, and add the 2 subscription products that we created in step 1 and step 2, into this bundle. Here’s how it looks like:

Make sure that both the products in the bundled have the Priced Individually option enabled as shown here:

Enable Mixed Checkout

WooCommerce Subscriptions has a feature called Mixed Checkout. This needs to be enabled to allow multiple subscription purchases in one cart. Since our product bundle contains two separate subscription products, Mixed Checkout needs to be enabled so that customers can purchase the bundle.

To enable Mixed Checkout, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Subscriptions, and enable the Mixed Checkout option as shown below:

The Result

Finally, this is how customers will see the bundled product that we just created:

With this setup, customers

• are charged $0 at the time of signup
• have access to Fit at Home videos for a week (i.e. during their trial period)
• are charged $399 at the end of the 1st week ($300 for the equipment, and $99 for the Fit at Home subscription)
• are charged $99 every month from the following month onwards

The post Subscriptions Use Case: Charging One Time Fee/Signup Fee After the Free Trial Period first appeared on CODIBU.

You’ve always wanted to roast your own beans. You love the smell of coffee in the morning so much that you’ve started a store selling your coffee creations. Now you want to offer a subscription of your fresh roasts to the world. Here’s how to do it with WooCommerce.

First let’s talk about what we’re working with. We’re running our store on WooCommerce, with the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension. To round things out, Storefront helps make our site look great.

Products used for this use case

• WooCommerce (free)
• WooCommerce Subscriptions (purchase)
• Storefront theme (free)

Set up your store

1. Install WooCommerce.

Your WordPress site now has functionality to be an online store. More at: Installing WooCommerce.

2. Install WooCommerce Subscriptions.

• Download the extension from your WooCommerce dashboard.
• Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload and select the ZIP file you just downloaded.
• Click Install Now, and then Activate.

3. Create a Subscription product.

• Go to: Product > Add New.
• Give your product a name, description and product image.
• Choose Variable Subscription as the product type if you wish to offer different types of coffee packages (as in our example). For example, we’ll give the option between ground beans and whole beans. Choose Simple Subscription, if you don’t want to let your customers choose between anything.

More at: Subscriptions Store Manager Guide.

4. Set up product basics.

Now set up other product basics. You’ll see that the sections running down the left of the Product data metabox change slightly.

• Leave the General tab and Inventory tab to the default settings.

• Enter dimensions and weight in the Shipping tab.

5. Create product attributes.

To create options for your customers to select, you must first create those options in the Attributes tab before setting them up in the Variations tab. Since the product is variable, we need to decide what the variation is.

• In Attributes, next to Custom product attribute, select Add. A few new fields will now appear.
• Choose a Name for your attribute, such as, Beans or Ground.
• Add Values. The values are separated by a pipe (“|”). You can select as many as you need but for our store we only need two.
• Select Used for variations.
• Save Attributes.

6. Create product variations.

In the Variations tab:

• Select Create variations from all attributes and then select Go. A pop-up window asking if you are certain you want to do this will appear.
• Select OK. WooCommerce will create two variations for you.

7. Set up product variations

• Set the Default Form Value to Whole bean coffee as we want the customers to already see a default option.
• Click Expand in the top right of the Variations tab to see all variations and see where to edit the variations.
• Give each variation a different image and SKU.
• Enter an administrative sign-up fee and a subscription price. In the example below, we’ve entered £5 and £30.
• Save Changes.

8. Publish the product to offer your subscription for sale.

Start selling!

Recurring payment option

To offer the option for customers to automatically pay for subscriptions without billing them each cycle, you need to set this up.

1. Select a payment gateway that supports automatic recurring payments at the Subscriptions Payments Guide.
2. Sign up with the payment gateway. Which payment option is right for me?
3. Enable the option on your site.

Customer view

Your customers can now sign up for a delicious coffee subscription. Below are two screenshots of what they see: The product page and the checkout page. You’ll see that on the checkout page there is information about the first payment, but also about the recurring amount.

The post Subscriptions Use Case: Coffee first appeared on CODIBU.

If you would like to see your site included here, submit a request to support.

To see more examples, visit our Showcase.

General

• Craft Boxes for Kids
• TerraPass – Carbon Offsets
• Sock Fancy – Fancy Socks
• NicSocks – Bamboo Socks

Coffee & beverage

• Henry’s House of Coffee
• Salt & Straw Ice Cream
• Honest Brew

Food

• Picky Bars
• Flex Foods Healthy Meal Delivery
• Alpha Dog Food
• The Feed – Energy Food for Peak Performance
• COOKIE…take a bite!

Memberships & services

• Diplomatic Council Think Thank
• HD Piano Lessons
• Griffin Photography Museum

The post Stores using WooCommerce Subscriptions first appeared on CODIBU.