How To Offer a Subscription Product as a One-Time Purchase in WooCommerce

It’s no secret that subscription products are all the rage these days. Consumers love the convenience of having their favorite products delivered to their door on a regular basis, and businesses love the guaranteed revenue stream that subscriptions provide.

But what if you’re a WooCommerce store owner who doesn’t want to offer only subscriptions? You might want to sell one-time purchase products, or maybe you just want to experiment with subscriptions as your business model.

Well, fear not! You have a way to offer subscription products as a one-time purchase in WooCommerce. It’s a little bit of a workaround, but it’s definitely possible. 

In this article, we’ll look at how to use Autoship Cloud, a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin that lets you turn your standard website into a subscription store, to set up subscription items, and enable one-time payments for them.

How Can You Set Up Subscription Products?

WooCommerce by default doesn’t have any built-in subscription functionality. That’s because subscriptions are a bit of a specialty product type and not something that every store owner needs. As such, it doesn’t make sense for WooCommerce to include subscription functionality in the core software. 

Let’s say, for example, that you own a WooCommerce store that sells physical goods. You could use the built-in functionality to set up recurring payment options for your products. Nonetheless, it’s not really necessary since most people who buy physical goods don’t want them delivered on a regular basis. It would just be a wasted code.

However, plenty of WooCommerce plugins add subscription functionality to the software.

In this article, we’ll use Autoship Cloud, a plugin that lets you turn your standard WooCommerce store into a subscription store.

What is Autoship Cloud?

Autoship Cloud is a WordPress plugin that enables subscriptions as well as subscription products as a one-time purchase.

For example, stores that sell pet food could use Autoship to let their customers subscribe to a monthly shipment of goods. The plugin handles all the recurring billing so you don’t have to worry about it.

You can use Autoship to turn any product in your WooCommerce store into a subscription without writing any code or messing with any settings. You can easily schedule when the recurring payments should be made, and you can even offer discounts for customers who subscribe. 

Using Autoship Cloud, you can quickly convert all of your items into subscription products by “bulk” applying Amazon-like subscribe and save schemes to every product on your WooCommerce site.

Plus, Autoship Cloud integrates with a number of popular WooCommerce plugins, including Memberships, Groups, and Bookings. This means that you can offer subscriptions to products that are already part of a membership site or booking system.

Here’s how you can set it up:

1. Install and activate the Autoship Cloud plugin.

2. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Autoship Cloud to configure the plugin settings.

3. In the General Settings tab, select whether you want to offer subscriptions as a one-time purchase or as recurring subscriptions.

4. Configure the other settings according to your preferences.

5. Save your changes.

Now that the plugin is configured, you’re ready to set up your subscription products! For more detailed instructions, check out our guide on how to set up WooCommerce subscriptions.

How It Works

Autoship Cloud allows your customers to check out their selected products as subscriptions or one-time purchases. If they choose the subscription option, they’ll be asked to select a delivery frequency (weekly, monthly, etc.). Once they’ve made their selection, they’ll be able to complete the checkout process and start receiving their products on the schedule that they’ve chosen.

This is great as this plug-in doesn’t just transform your products into subscription products; it also allows for one-time purchases as well. This is perfect if you want to offer subscriptions but don’t want to force your customers into a recurrent billing cycle.

You can show your subscription choices in conversion-optimized ways on your product, basket, and checkout pages with Autoship Cloud. Additionally, You can personalize them with the easy-to-use CSS. However, they already appear to be a part of your store in their default settings.

Upselling subscriptions at checkout is a breeze with Autoship Cloud as it offers one-click subscribe buttons that can be placed next to your “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” buttons.

There are no limits on the products you can offer as subscriptions. You can even offer subscription variations of the same product! For example, if you sell T-shirts, you could offer a monthly subscription where customers receive a different shirt each month.

Here are some of its other features:

1. Payment Gateways

With Autoship Cloud, you can integrate with over ten popular payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net. This means that you can use the gateway of your choice to accept payments for your subscription products. You can apply CSS to match your eCommerce store’s branding easily, or let Autoship Cloud generate your subscription forms.

2. SendGrid Integration

Autoship Cloud integrates with SendGrid, meaning that you can send automated emails to your subscribers. For example, you could set up an email campaign to notify customers when their subscription is about to renew. Or you could send a “thank you” email after a customer signs up for a subscription.

3. Amazing Shipping Rates

With Autoship Cloud, you can offer your customers the best shipping rates from UPS, FedEx, and USPS. You can also offer free shipping for subscription orders.

Plus, if you’re using WooCommerce Memberships or Groups, you can offer discounted or free shipping to your members.

4. Real-time Inventory Sync

If you sell physical goods, you’ll want to make sure that your inventory is always accurate. With Autoship Cloud, you can enable real-time inventory sync, meaning that your inventory will be automatically updated when a customer subscribes or unsubscribes from a product.

This is a great way to avoid overselling products and disappointing customers.

Offering a Subscription Product as a One-Time Purchase

Offering customers the flexibility to buy a subscription product as a one-time purchase is a great way to increase conversions and boost sales. Unlike setting them up to commit to a recurring payment, this option gives customers the ability to try out your product without any long-term commitment. 

Because of this, Autoship doesn’t turn your offering only into a subscription product. It enables you to offer clients the choice to buy the product once and then at a discounted rate if they choose to buy it often. 

6 reasons why Autoship Cloud is the best WooCommerce subscriptions plugin

Autoship Cloud enables you to offer the best experience to customers by enabling:

1. Converting customers into subscribers by upselling on existing products just by adding upsells like “Add Autoship” or “Add Scheduling”. This makes it easy to turn an existing product into a subscription without any coding required. It can be applied globally to all products or configured on a per-product basis.

2. Discounting the price or offering free shipping to customers who subscribe. This can be done by setting up a coupon that lowers the subscription price compared to the one-time purchase price or enables free shipping on all orders over a certain amount. 

3. Editable scheduled orders (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) or date. This allows you to send shipments on the customer’s schedule instead of all at once. It gives you and your customers the ability to better space out shipments and payments.

4. Automatic renewals ensure customers never have to worry about their subscription running out. Customers can choose to cancel their subscription renewal at any time!

5. Easy management of subscriptions from the WooCommerce admin. This includes the ability to view, edit, suspend, and cancel subscriptions. You can also see what products are being subscribed to and when the next renewal is scheduled.

6. By seamlessly integrating scheduled goods into the cart and checkout process with already-existing products on your site, scheduling enables consumers who have only ever purchased an item once to set up recurring purchases on their own!

So why not add the convenience of a subscription to your product offerings? 

No long-term commitment required

When you offer a subscription product as a one-time purchase, customers aren’t required to commit to anything long-term. They can try out your product without having to worry about being locked into a recurring payment. This is a great way to increase conversions because it removes any barriers to purchasing.

You can still offer discounts to non-subscribers

Just because customers aren’t signing up for a recurring payment doesn’t mean you can’t offer them discounts. You can still offer a discounted price for nonsubscribers. This is a great way to increase sales because it makes your product more affordable.

It’s easy to manage

Autoship makes it easy to manage your subscription products. You can easily view, edit, suspend, and cancel subscriptions from the WooCommerce admin. This makes it easy to keep track of your customers and make sure they’re happy with their purchase.

It’s a great way to increase sales

Offering a subscription product as a one-time purchase is a great way to increase sales. It’s an easy way to upsell customers on existing products, and it’s also a great way to offer discounts.

Improved customer journey

With scheduled shipments  integrated into the cart and checkout process, and support for multiple payment methods, Autoship Cloud helps you improve the customer journey and makes it easy for customers to set up recurring purchases on their own.

Conclusion

Offering a subscription product as a one-time purchase is a great way to reach a larger audience and increase your conversion rate. It allows potential customers who may not want to commit to a recurring payment the ability to buy from you, gives you the ability to increase your average order value, and can increase your conversion rate. 

This is beneficial for two reasons: it allows you to reach more customers with your product, and it helps increase the conversion rate of people who do want to sign up for subscription plans by making the offer more appealing. 

With AutoShip Cloud, your limitations with your WooCommerce store are no longer an issue. With AutoShip Cloud, you can set up your subscription business on autopilot and have more time to enjoy your life. This WooCommerce subscription add-on can easily become your best business decision.

While there are many reasons to switch to Autoship Cloud, it ultimately comes down to this: we make your life easier!