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April 17, 2019 - 1 Comment
From closed beta to successfully-funded Kickstarter to start-up with $1 million in funding, Timeular is on a mission to help people track their time and make it count with a multi-sided, customizable device.
Raise your hand if you could do with a little more data on how you spend your days! And read on for our Q&A with Manuel Bruschi, one of Timeular’s founders.
November 22, 2018 - 12 Comments
What happens when the brick and mortar shop you were banking on becomes obsolete? Reinvent yourself with a new eCommerce venture, of course!
For Chris Hugo, founder of Dogs Meow, launching a pet food subscription business was his way of adapting to a changing market. “I spent my life running the family business of DVD rentals,” he says. “As you might have guessed, it’s not the most sustainable business.”
To support his two young kids and three dogs, Chris needed to find a business idea that would keep them all happy. If it could involve animals, then even better.
November 16, 2018 - 6 Comments
If you’ve spent precious minutes in a supermarket trying to decipher which variety of near-identical dry pet food is right for your dog – and even if you haven’t – you’ll appreciate the simplicity of Scratch.
Founded by Mike Halligan and Doug Spiegelhauer in early 2018, this thoughtful Australian startup has three audacious goals: eliminate the guesswork, bureaucracy, and secrecy that dogs the pet food industry, to make customers smile, and to save the planet while they’re at it. And they do it all with WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions.
October 11, 2018 - 14 Comments
Subscriptions can be a fantastic gift option, and with the new WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting a customer can easily share their love for your store with their friends and family this holiday season.
My parents are both in their eighties and are notoriously hard to buy presents for. Giving them anything remotely technological results in a Christmas Day filled with exclamations of ‘How do you turn it on again?’ or ‘What! What! It’s broken!’ So most years Mum just gets her normal gardening gear and Dad gets a bottle of gin; they each have their own interests 😉
However, one year I won the ‘best gift’ award.
Historic houses are my parents’ one joint love. While my budget is yet to stretch to buying them the real Downton Abbey, a monthly subscription to the organization that runs sites of interest in the UK, the National Trust, was within reach. So my parents could go any time and visit as many places as they wished. They loved it.
I felt pretty smug with my inspired gift idea back then, but now a subscription is a unique gift that any online store can provide – for any person, of any age.
It is a great way to stand out in the busy holiday market and give customers a chance to give something a little bit special. Also, the investment you made in getting your customers to go to your store for their holiday shopping pays dividends throughout the year. You have the chance to create the on-going relationship a subscription gets, so both you, the customer and the recipient continue to benefit, long after the heartburn from holiday overindulgence has faded. A subscription may not necessarily be for life – but it is not just for a moment either!
So WooCommerce Subscriptions allows you to create a holiday gift that lasts all year, and with WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting it’s now possible for one person to buy a subscription product for somebody else.
Customers can choose to purchase subscriptions for others by entering the recipient’s email on the product page, cart, or checkout.
February 22, 2018 - 10 Comments
You’ve decided to take the leap. You or your client is going to start an online business.
You’ve chosen WooCommerce and WordPress to power your store. You’re planning to include a subscriptions component to sell more with less work.
You’ve made some great decisions already, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy!
WooCommerce Subscriptions now powers recurring payments for more than 15,000 stores. Over the last five years, as part of the team developing the software, I’ve learned a lot about subscriptions from a technical perspective and want to share these lessons.
Taking 10 minutes to read this article, then acting on its recommendations could give you a return of weeks and thousands of dollars in savings.
I’m going to focus on three important areas:
July 13, 2016 - 2 Comments
Running a subscriptions-based business, or simply adding subscriptions to your existing online store, can result in some amazing things — higher revenue, happier customers, and a unique value proposition that helps you stand out in your industry.
Less amazing than the results, though? All the time you’ll need to spend making those things happen. Curating products for subscriptions can be time-consuming enough, not to mention the time it takes to engage with new and existing subscribers, manage renewals, print shipping labels, send orders out, improve your plans to gain more subscribers…
Phew. It’s tiring just reading that.
Before you convince yourself it’s too much work to run a subscriptions site or expand your existing subscriptions business, you should know that there’s a simple way to dramatically cut back on the amount of time you have to invest in it: automation.
Thanks to a few handy integrations and extensions that work with WooCommerce, plus Zapier’s added support for WooCommerce Subscriptions, it’s easier than ever to automate communication, order processing, and subscription management for your site. By setting up just one or two automations, you can save yourself hours of time, not to mention countless headaches and (perhaps most importantly) money.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can automate a site with WooCommerce Subscriptions to make your life a whole lot easier.
June 23, 2016 - 6 Comments
If your business is based on the subscription model, or you offer subscriptions on your store, this is a reality you already know: the path to acquiring a subscriber is a long and tedious one.
Shoppers can take a long time to make up their minds about spending money, but that goes double for an investment over many weeks or months. The task of convincing someone that they need your product or service on a recurring basis isn’t easy, either — even if it’s something they really enjoy, like chocolate or coffee.
So what’s a subscriptions site to do if they want to shorten this path to acquisition? For starters: take a long, hard look at your store’s homepage and the role it’s playing in convincing potential subscribers to sign up.
Your homepage is the first thing most potential customers see, after all. And if it’s not making a compelling enough argument about the benefits of your products, a subscription model, or your company, you can kiss the promise of recurring revenue goodbye.
Let’s explore some of the best practices you should follow for customizing the homepage of a subscription site, and discuss how they can ultimately help you secure more subscribers.
May 20, 2016 - 6 Comments
With traditional eCommerce, the exchange of money and goods is simple: a customer pays, and the store owner ships. Easy, right?
But this doesn’t have to be the only way you accept payments for the products you sell online. Taking immediate payments might not work if you want to offer pre-orders. And taking only one payment won’t be suitable for customers who want to order something via subscription.
If you’re only accepting payments for your products the “traditional” way, you might want to consider expanding your options. Here are five ways to take payments with WooCommerce, and how to add them to your store.
April 20, 2016 - 10 Comments
Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world. It’s also one of the most popular products sold via a subscription model.
If you’re considering starting an online coffee store, you’re likely wondering what the vital ingredients for a speciality eCommerce website are. Do you need to spend loads to offer monthly subscriptions of your roasts or beans? And which platforms are suitable for selling this specialty product?
In this post, we’ll guide you through setting up a coffee subscription business from start to finish, giving you all the tools and insight you need to start off on the right foot. We’ll cover why coffee sells particularly well by subscription, some key elements to running a coffee business, and make some suggestions for choosing the right eCommerce platform for your new store.
Ready to give it a go? Read on to learn all you need to know about starting your store.
March 17, 2016 - 6 Comments
According to a cross-channel marketing report conducted by Responsys and Econsultancy, 70% of companies find it’s more costly to acquire new customers than it is to bring back existing ones.
This is undoubtedly one of the reasons that subscription models have become so popular in the world of eCommerce. Subscriptions keep those hard-fought customers on the hook for automatic repeat purchases, plus they create a reliable source of recurring revenue.
However, starting a successful subscription-based business, or adding a subscription to your existing store, isn’t easy. It takes careful planning, knowledge of your customers’ needs, willingness to try new things… and then some.
If you’re considering trying the subscription model for yourself, here’s what you should know and do to bolster your chances at long-term success.
October 5, 2015 - 56 Comments
Want to sell different subscription products in the same transaction? Or change the expiration date for an existing subscription? Or perhaps you want customers to be able to view the full details of their subscription, including taxes, shipping method and shipping address?
You can now do all of this, and much more, with the release of WooCommerce Subscriptions 2.0!
Subscriptions 2.0 reinvents one of our most popular extensions to take into account three years of feedback from store owners. As well as introducing new features, version 2.0 improves a number of existing features and changes the internals, making it easier to customise the extension and scale it to meet the needs of your growing customer base.
Here’s a look at some of the best new additions in Subscriptions 2.0.
June 16, 2015 - 2 Comments
Subscription-based businesses seem to be all the rage right now. There are delivery services for everything from coffee to diapers, websites that promise to send you carefully curated fashion pieces you’ll love, and subscription-only sites for online education. These businesses have picked up on one important thing: customers don’t just like getting deliveries. They like getting deliveries that make their lives easier.
Even if you operate a traditional, straightforward eCommerce website that’s been running like clockwork for years, you too can shake things up and create a new revenue stream by tapping into the same theory as these businesses. No matter what you sell, ship, and deliver to customers, you can create a subscription service that offers plenty of benefits to your customers… and to you!
Let’s take a look at how your store can benefit from offering subscriptions, no matter how big or small they are, and some tips to keep in mind if you choose to implement them.
January 27, 2014 - 9 Comments
When you run an online business, it’s important to blog regularly.
Of course, you know this already. Without a blog, it would be very difficult to get leads. Blog posts are one of the ways through which online entrepreneurs get people to signup to an email list. And your email list gives you access to a lead’s inbox, which is an important place to be.
November 19, 2012 - 18 Comments
With it came a bunch of great new features to put more power in the hands of store managers wanting to sell subscription products. We hope this post will help store managers get the most out of these new features.
If you don’t already know, WooCommerce Subscriptions is the recurring payments extension for WooCommerce.
Version 1 was released back in June. That first version did little more than act as a middleman between WooCommerce and payment gateways which could process a recurring payment, like PayPal & Stripe.
June 21, 2012 - 65 Comments
We know you’ve been waiting for this for a long while. Today we can happily report we have an extension allowing recurring billing using WooCommerce!
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