Recurring revenue on your own merchant account.
Subscription businesses live or die on renewal success rate. Vaulted tokens, a sane retry schedule and a card update flow customers can use without emailing you are the three things that decide it.
Subscriptions need the Enterprise plan and the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension.
What usually hurts
The problems merchants in this category describe, and what answers each one.
Failed renewals nobody notices
A decline that produces no email and no retry is silent churn. Renewals here follow the WooCommerce retry schedule and trigger the standard customer notices.
Expiring cards
Cards expire faster than subscriptions end. Customers update their own card from My Account, and Account Updater support from your processor keeps most tokens fresh.
Card details arriving by email
If updating a card means contacting you, someone will send a card number in plain text. The self service flow removes the temptation.
Platform risk on recurring revenue
A frozen platform account is survivable for a one off shop and existential for a subscription business. Your own merchant agreement is harder to lose overnight.
How to set it up
The configuration that fits this kind of store.
- Enable the vault and subscriptionsTurn on saved cards, then confirm the plugin appears as a supported gateway inside WooCommerce Subscriptions settings.
- Set the retry schedule deliberatelyRetries too close together annoy issuers, too far apart lose the customer. Space them over a week and send the emails.
- Test a renewal before launchingCreate a subscription in sandbox, then trigger the renewal manually and confirm the vault token is charged and the order is created.
- Plan for dunningWrite the failed payment email yourself. The default text is functional and does not sound like your brand.
Renewals have run for eight months without a single manual charge, and the card update page cut our failed payment tickets to almost nothing.
Do I still need WooCommerce Subscriptions?
Can subscriptions be paid by ACH?
What happens on a hard decline?
Can customers pause instead of cancel?
Related
Features that matter most here.
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