WooCommerce Subscriptions

I’ve been playing around with trying to implement subscriptions in our store for a couple of years, and each time, there’s a complexity that stops me in my tracks. The biggest one is inventory management. All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions does a great job of sharing inventory between the underlying product and the subscription version of it. That’s all great.

But we have around 800 SKUs and many of our suppliers are quite flaky, so we can go out of stock of things despite our best intentions. WC Subscriptions will fire off a renewal whether stock is available or not, so I can easily see problems arising where our stock is low and someone buys it all up before the renewal triggers. I don’t want to let our most loyal customers down. If there’s a risk of that, I won’t implement subscriptions to products.

So here’s a feature suggestion:

Core Feature: Inventory Hold
For each product, bundle, or product underlying the bundle that is enabled for subscriptions, and optionally for the subscription itself, make an option to prevent sales (eg. remove the Buy button with a message “Sorry we only have enough stock for our subscription customers at the moment”, or simply mark out of stock). This will allow store managers to stop non-renewal sales that jeopardise subscription renewals.

Automation feature
• Automatically disable sales of the underlying when stock level reaches the number required to fulfil subscriptions in the next [Days]. This would include preventing orders for multiple items that would take the stock below the number required for renewals.
• At that time, notify Admin, eg.: “Sales of [Product] have been disabled because you need all remaining stock for Subscription Renewals in the next [Days] days. Click here to release this inventory hold completely. Click here to edit this inventory hold and save stock for a smaller number of days’ renewals.”

This could entirely prevent stockouts disrupting renewals.