How to Easily Accept WooCommerce Recurring Payments Without Any Fee?

It makes sense to create a business or fundraising model that draws the income from a consistent client base because getting repeat business from the same consumers is less expensive than gaining new ones.

You can charge your customers on a regular basis, frequently monthly or annually, thanks to systems for recurring payments. 

In light of this, let’s examine the process for including subscriptions in WooCommerce. In this article, we’ll show you how to add WooCommerce recurring payments for free.

What is WooCommerce recurring payment?

Recurring billing is the process of billing your clients, customers, or donors on a regular basis for a certain amount of time or forever. The sum is simply charged to your clients’ credit cards rather than being sent as an invoice or request. Because you’re not bothering your customers with payment requests, automated billing can improve their experience and help you retain them.

Why Should You Accept Recurring Payments in WooCommerce?

Including WooCommerce subscriptions on your WordPress website has several advantages. One of the main benefits of recurring payments is that they give your business a consistent income stream and make it easier for customers to pay their bills automatically.

Here are some other advantages if you enable subscription billing on your WooCommerce store:

• You may automate your billing, so you won’t have to deal with processing credit cards, paying checks, or mailing invoices each month. There is a lot less work to do now, which saves you a ton of time.
• There are fewer missed or late payments because the system is automated. You do not need to manually send an invoice to your clients each month.
• This increases the possibility that customers will stay because they don’t have to make a new purchasing decision every month.
• Sensitive information is less likely to be duplicated or circulated, keeping payment information secure.
• There are fewer embarrassing discussions regarding late or missing payments with your customers, improving your relationship overall. 
• You may improve the cash flow of your online store and reduce payment delays and errors by including subscription payments.
• You can reduce the amount you spend on supplies like paper, envelopes, and stamps.

How to enable recurring payment in WooCommerce without fee?

There are multiple plugins that allow you to include recurring payment in your WooCommerce store, such as Stripe, Paypal, WPForm plugin, etc. But these are paid options. 

In this tutorial, we just focus on a free solution. This approach is intended for store owners on a tight budget who want to add WooCommerce subscriptions for free.

We’ll use the YITH WooCommerce Subscription plugin to accomplish this. With this free plugin, subscriptions for simple, digital, or downloadable products can be easily added.

Let’s follow this step-by-step guide to add WooCommerce recurring payment without fee.

Step 1: Download and activate YITH WooCommerce Subscription plugin on your store.

From your WordPress dashboard, click Plugins > Add New

You then search for the YITH WooCommerce Subscription plugin in the search box.

Now, you click Install Now > Activate to enable the plugin.

Step 2: Add new subscription 

After installing and activating the plugin, go to YITH > Subscriptions from the left sidebar in your WordPress dashboard.

From the top menu, navigate to Subscriptions > ADD NEW SUBSCRITION to create a recurring payment.

Here, you will see 3 sections, including Subscription Info, Subscription Product, and Subscription’s History. Just leave them as the default setting.

You need to make sure the Subscription Action is set as Actions. Finally, hit the Process button to update your subscription.

You can check if it lives on your WooCommerce store or not by clicking on the link that says “back to all subscriptions”.

You then see a table displaying all subscriptions created on your store.

Step 3: General settings

Navigate to General Settings from the menu tab to make some general settings for your recurring payments.

As you see in the image below, you should keep the default settings and save them by clicking the Save Options at the bottom of the page. However, you can definitely change any option if you want. That will decide how the subscription works in your store.

Step 4: Other customizations

In this part, you can change the CTA on the product page, cart page, and checkout page.

When you finish, just tick the Save Options button.

Step 5: Set subscription to products

The next step is to choose a product you want to include a subscription.

Go to Products > All Products.

Then, you can select a product to add subscription.

Scroll to the ‘Product data’ box and tick the ‘Subscription’ check box. This will add a new section where you can specify the subscription price, time, and limitations.

Once you’ve entered your subscription information, save your product by clicking the Update button on the left side of your single product page.

When your visitors purchase a product, they will now have the option to pay by subscription.

Conclusion,

Just like other payment options like Paypal, Stripe, or WooCommerce Apple Pay, accepting recurring payments is easier than ever before. There are several payment gateway plugins for your WooCommerce store that can correctly process recurring payments for subscription-based items. 

We’ve shown you how to add WooCommerce recurring payments for free by using a free WooCommerce subscription plugin. If you have any further questions or recommendations, just let us know by leaving a comment below.