How Subscriptions Manages Stock

Setting up inventory management for subscription products is generally no different than setting stock for a simple product or variable product. The key difference is the subscription renewal process which, by default, acts as a recurring inventory reduction mechanism. This guide explains how this process works.

WooCommerce Subscriptions creates an order to record each renewal payment. Each of these orders includes the subscription product as an item, so when they process the order, they reduce the stock for that item. This method ensures accurate inventory management for physical products that they need to ship each billing period. Let’s take a look at an example:

If a store has 100 widgets in stock and a customer buys a weekly subscription to those widgets, the store reduces the widget stock by one for the initial purchase, leaving 99 widgets. After the first renewal a week later, the store reduces the stock by one again, leaving 98 widgets. A week later, when the subscription renews a second time, the store reduces the stock again, leaving 97 widgets.

In some cases, you may not want stock to renew on each renewal order. If that’s the case, you can use the free  Woo Subscriptions – Do Not Reduce Stock on Renewal extension to achieve that. If you choose to manage subscription stock this way, please that it applies to all subscription products by default and would require customization if you only want this to apply to certain products.

No. New renewal orders will continue to process as normal when the stock quantity for a subscription product reaches 0. When this occurs, the stock count will go into the negative. If you wish to stop renewals for out-of-stock products, you need to suspend any subscriptions that contain the out-of-stock product.

Note: There is one caveat to this rule – If customers are renewing early or have manual renewal payments configured instead of automatic renewal, they will not be able to process their renewal. This is because manual renewals require the customer to go through the checkout process again and much like customers purchasing a new subscription, this triggers an out-of-stock warning on the product page or in the cart/checkout.