Use WooCommerce Subscribe All the Things to add product and cart subscriptions

Subscription products are becoming increasingly popular. For store owners, these create higher revenues and a consistent cash flow by providing a better line of sight and recurrence on purchases. For customers, these products reduce the effort to reorder for things that are used often, like coffee beans, shaving razors, batteries, etc. In today’s post, we will look at the new WooCommerce Subscribe All the Things extension to create subscription options for products.

Easily offer subscriptions on WooCommerce products

So far, if you wanted to sell a one-time purchase product, you could do so by creating a simple product in WooCommerce. If you wanted to sell a subscription product, you could do so by creating a separate subscription product. You could also sell these together by including both options through a third product with the other two as linked products. The entire process was a bit cumbersome and could be harder to track as your product shelf grew larger.

In addition, customers have had no way to add a subscription for products on their entire cart. This can help align receiving different products at the same time from a subscription.

Enter the WooCommerce Subscribe All the Things extension for WooCommerce Subscriptions developed by Prospress (creators of WooCommerce Subscriptions) and SomewhereWarm (creators of WooCommerce Composite Products and Product Bundles).

The Subscribe All the Things extension allows you to add subscription options on simple products, and for products through extensions like Composite Products, Product Bundles, and Mix ‘n Match Products. You can also add subscription options to the entire cart.

We will go over adding subscription options to a simple product, and to the entire cart. In order to use this extension, you will require WooCommerce 2.3 or newer, and the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension version 2.0 or newer.

Subscriptions on simple products

Let’s get started by adding subscription options to a simple WooCommerce product. We will use an example “Happy Ninja” hoodie to which we will add options.

subscribe all the things before
Simple product before subscription options

First, download and activate the WooCommerce Subscribe All the Things plugin on your store. This will add a “Subscriptions” section to the Product Data area within an individual product. In our example, we navigate to the Happy Ninja hoodie product and open the Subscriptions tab in product information.

subscribe all the things options
Add subscription options under product data section

Here, you can configure subscription details for the product. These include:

  • Force subscription in order to remove the one-time purchase option so that customers will only be able to purchase a subscription.
  • Default to either One-time purchase or the Subscription. This will be the default option selected when customers click on the product or add it to the cart without making an alternate selection.
  • Subscription prompt to specify the text before the purchase options area.
  • Subscription Options to add recurrence – (every/every 2nd to 6th) – (day/week/month/year) – for (all time/ 1 to 24 months).
  • Subscription Price where you can Inherit the price from the product and assign a discount percentage, or Override product price to a set value.

Save and update the product to have the subscription options reflected on the store.

subscribe all the things after subscriptions
Subscription options for the simple product

Customers can now select the type of purchase they want to make. You can select the default option to be a subscription if you want to encourage customers towards an ongoing purchase. Typically, subscriptions are priced lower than a one-time purchase, and the discount is higher for longer-duration subscriptions.

Once the selection is made, customers can add this product to their cart, where they can still configure their purchase option.

subscribe all the things cart options
Purchase options appear in cart

This allows customers to easily evaluate and make changes at different points of their purchase journey. This is for subscription options on an individual product. Now, let’s configure the extension to allow subscriptions on the entire cart.

Subscriptions for entire cart

Other than adding subscription options for individual products, you can also allow subscription purchase options on the entire cart. This can help customers easily turn their entire cart to a subscription purchase recurring at the same time.

To add options to the entire cart, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Subscriptions and scroll down to the Subscribe to Cart area.

subscribe all the things entire cart options
Configure subscription options for the entire cart (Source)

Similar to the individual product options, here you can add multiple options. These can be (every/every 2nd to 6th) – (day/week/month/year) – for (all time/ 1 to 24 months). You can also configure the order in which these options appear.

subscribe all the things simple cart
Cart subscription options for simple products

Once you save the cart options, any time customers add simple products to their cart, they will be able to select subscription purchases for the entire cart. Note that the options appear separate from the products in the cart, and get applied to all items in the cart. This is true when individual products in the cart don’t have their own subscription options.

subscribe all the things mixed cart
Cart options when a product has subscription options

If a customer adds a product to the cart which has subscription options (for example, the hoodie we created subscriptions for above), and simple products without subscription options, the cart options appear on individual products where no subscription options were defined.

In our example, the Happy Ninja hoodie at the bottom inherits options that were set on that product, whereas the other two products which did not have their own options inherit the options available for the cart.

In each case, customers can easily configure their purchase option to be one-time or a subscription.

Summary

You can now easily offer subscription options along with one-time purchases for your WooCommerce products through the new WooCommerce Subscribe All the Things extension. The extension also gives you the ability to provide cart subscriptions so that all products in the cart can be purchased as a subscription. You can set multiple options for how the subscription can be purchased.

Subscriptions can help create more loyal customers and improve your store’s customer lifetime value. The cart subscription makes it easy for customers to receive all their cart items at the same time on a recurring basis.

Manos Psychogyiopoulos briefly talked about the extension in his interview with us.

Do you currently offer subscriptions along with individual products? Tell us in the comments how this extension can help your store.

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Beka Rice
Beka Rice is the Head of Product at Jilt. She works on app improvements, integration plugins, helping merchants improve recovery campaigns, and shares tutorials on reducing abandonment or improving recovery on our blog.

56 Comments

  2. This looks very promising. Can I ask how a customer with a subscription in place, could alter it, or add another product?
    Lets say they subscribe to 2 products (A & B) monthly, and next month they’d like product C adding to their order?

    1. Hey Mark, I believe customers can remove items, but cannot add them to a subscription. However, an administrator could do this manually, so it may be possible to implement in the future. I’d recommend adding your feedback on the plugin’s repo to see if it will make it on the roadmap :)

  3. Hi Guys, does anyone know how to change the word ‘None’ in the product options to display something like ‘One time purchase’ instead when choosing whether to describe or not? Thanks, Mike

      1. Hi Beka, thanks for introducing this plugin. I followed the steps but it didn’t work. Do you happen to know any other ways to change the word “None” to “One time purchase”? Thanks a lot!

        1. I’d recommend double-checking the textdomain and settings — I’m seeing this work for me with Say What, and if that doesn’t work, then no other translation method would do so.

    2. Add the following code to you funciton’s file.
      I’m not sure it’s the best way to do it, but it works.

      function wc_subscriptions_custom_one_time_purchase_string( $pricestring ) {

      $newprice = str_replace( 'none', 'One-time purchase', $pricestring );
      print_r( "..".$pricestring . "..<br/>..");
      return $newprice;

      }

      add_filter( ‘wcsatt_single_product_one_time_option_description’, ‘wc_subscriptions_custom_one_time_purchase_string’ );

      1. I am trying to this as well and none of the above methods are working, is there any other way to change “None” to “One Time” please let me know, thanks

  6. Hi,
    thanks for your work and your exaplanations.
    Is it possible to apply a % discount to all entire subscriptions?
    For example, if I choose to subscribe to an entire order for a year, I’ve got a 10% discount on the total.
    Fred

  7. Thanks for this plugin. it fullfill my client requirements. it works smoothly. but as subscriber’s view, when i resubscribe cancelled subscription. it do not resubscribe after successfully checkout. you need to lookup on subscriber’s view on front-end side.

  8. It is possible that allow swithching for simple product in woocommerce subscription settings, right now it allow only for subscription variation and grouped subscription product

  9. i was told that this extension is still in Beta, and not to use it on live sites…is that still the case or is anyone using it live right now?

    We have a live site with a ton of variable products already available for purchase…if i purchased just the subscription extension, i would have to redo every product. However if this mini extension is ready it would make my job a lot easier.

    It does work with variable products as well as simple ones, correct?

  10. Improvements and corrections are currently being made to support the latest changes in WooCommerce Subscription 2.1 but as far as I can tell it the plugin does work. It works with variable products on the product level. It is labelled beta because the code is not finalised.

  11. When adding subscriptions to a simple product and then forcing subscriptions, is there a way to change the “Add to cart” action to a “Select Options” actions as it does when choosing a Variable Subscription.

    1. Hey Gavin, I’d recommend submitting this one to Prospress on GitHub, if Subscriptions are forced it seems like a good idea that this should be the default behavior.

  12. So to clarify, if someone adds a subscription to any kind of product, when the subscription renews, an order is generated in WooCommerce also ?

  13. Hello,

    I am using Woocommerce Subscribe All the Things plugin in live site. i am using it from github free. is it working propery for live site. and is it free?

    2. Hey Kelsey, I haven’t seen this one myself — I’d recommend adding an issue to the repo to see if it’s something that’s on the roadmap to support.

  17. Is it possible to have the checkbox to subscribe / save on a non-product page? Using the ‘Add to Cart’ / ‘Add to Cart URL’ option on a non-product page.

    1. Hey Jay, I don’t think that’s possible given the code requirements needed to support opting into the subscription. You could consider just using a regular subscription product instead, for which an add to cart URL would automatically generate a subscription.

  18. Since upgrading to WooCommerce 3.0.1, instead of the option to for “every month” it says “every array” and instead of “every year” it says “every array.” When I downgrade back to WooCommerce 2.6.14 there is not a problem.

  19. Hello Guys,

    I just want to know when will woocommerce-subscribe-all-the-things update release for woocommerce 3.0+ version? my client want to know about next release. please reply me asap

  20. Hey there, Thanks for sharing! I downloaded this plugin but have found a problem – how do you change the labels of each payment option? Mine is saying: $13.99 / ‘array’ but I see in your example of the happy ninja jumper yours says $13.50/ 3 months.

    Thank you :)
    Shyr

    1. Hey Shyr, are you using WC 3.0+? The plugin hasn’t been fully updated yet, so this would likely result in errors like this incorrect label.

  21. Is there a time range, when it will be updated to run with WC 3.0+? I’m really looking forward to use this along with my normal subscriptions and it would be great to see this working with a updated WC setup.

    Best,

    Thomas

  22. I was wondering if the plugin works good now? It’s for commercial use with more then 100 transactions per day, so I wanna be sure before add this plugin to my website…but looks really interesting! Thank you

  24. Hello,
    We have added variations to the products but that subscription options not showing on single product page. What is the issue for this?

  25. Hello Team,

    It is possible switch subscription with this plugin? Currently woocommerce subscription support switching of subscription. I would like following things customer can make editable:
    1. add and delete items (products)
    2. change frequency
    3. change quantity

  26. Hi !
    Really nice plugin. I have to do some customization related to shipping price on cart as per user selection basis. Like if user chooses for this time only I want to show a different price and if user chooses the subscription option like I set monthly then I need to show a different price. So my question is how can I Differentiate in cart page that what product type is added into cart so that I can do some logics.

    Let me know if there is any filter/hook or any helping code that I can use into my cart to see what product type is added into cart. For now I can see that the product is only working as simple product weather we choose the subscription option.

    Thanks

  27. I am using this plugin and I loved it.I applied to the live website that I managed. Now we want to apply it to all existing products around 2,000+ and the problem is there’s no option on the back-end to do it,you need to update it one by one and it so time consuming. What is the possible solutions for this?

    Thank you.

  28. how to create a product subscription for daily delivery with weekly subscription and payment…

    Any Suggestions!!!!!!!

  30. Hello,

    I have composite product package and I don’t have regular price for this package, How can I set the subscription price in cart page and product page when we choose subscription plan.

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