Are you worried about managing subscription renewals in your WooCommerce store? Not anymore, we will help you manage your subscription renewals efficiently. If you are new to WooCommerce and want to add subscription options to your store, try this subscription plugin for WooCommerce. 

In this article, we will discuss how you can set all the subscription renewals to a specific date regardless of the date of the purchase.

What is Synchronization of Subscription Renewals?

Let’s see how subscription synchronization works. If a customer placed an order on 15th March for a product with a monthly subscription, the next renewal date will be on 15th April. And for another customer that has placed an order on the 16th, the renewal would be on the 16 of the next month. 

Synchronizing subscription renewal allows you to set the renewal date for all the subscriptions on your store to a particular date. Let’s say, you want the renewals to take place on the 1st of every month for all the customers. So it doesn’t matter whether the customer made the order on 15th March or 20th March, the renewal will occur only on the 1st of the next month. 

With this article, you will learn how to synchronize subscriptions in WooCommerce. 

This article is based on using the recommended plugin By WebToffee.

Steps to Enable Subscription Synchronization in WooCommerce

To enable subscriptions in a WooCommerce store, the first thing you need to do is install and activate the Subscription for the WooCommerce plugin. 

1. Enabling synchronization of subscription

  • Open the dashboard of your website. 
  • Go to WooCommerce > Settings.
WooCommerce settings
  • Click on the WebToffee Subscriptions tab.
WebToffee Subscriptions tab
  • Scroll down to the bottom and enable the ​​Subscription Synchronisation checkbox. 
Enabling Subscription synchronization
  • Click Save changes.

2. Creating a synchronized subscription product.

You can either create a new subscription product or edit an existing subscription. For a better understanding, let’s create a new synchronized subscription product.

In this example, we are creating a new subscription option for Nivea Men Deodorant.

Nivea Deo product Image

1 – Go to Products > Add new.

Enter the product details and upload images.

Adding Nivea Deo as a product

2 – In the Product Data meta box, choose simple subscription from the dropdown list. (We can synchronize subscriptions for variable subscriptions as well. More on that later in the article.)

3 – Set the subscription price and period. ( Let’s put $10 for every month)

I’ll set the subscription length to Never expire and keep the Signup fee and Free trial options blank.

Now let’s set the Subscription Synchronisation renewal date.

  • For weekly subscriptions: You can set any day of the week. (example: Monday)
  • For monthly subscriptions: You can set any days from 1 to 27 or the last day of the month.
  • For yearly subscriptions: You can set any particular date in a year. (example: 25 March)

Here we set the renewal period monthly, so let’s add the renewal date as 1st day of the month.

Setting Subscription Synchronization

Then you can see a checkbox ‘Enable Prorate first payment’. We’ll come to that later, now let’s leave it unchecked.

4 – Preview and Publish the product.

For variable subscriptions, you can set the subscription renewal period for each variation.

Synchronizing subscription for variable product

Publish to save the product.

Click on View Product.

Variable product page

Here a user can subscribe to a specific product variation. The price will vary depending on the variations set.

Read more details on how you can create a subscription product in WooCommerce.

Now let’s see what will happen when a customer places an order.

Go to the product page. 

Product page of Nivea Deo as a synchronised subscription product.

Click on Subscribe button. This will take you to the checkout page.

Checkout page of Nivea Deo men

Let’s fill in the billing details and proceed to checkout.

Order details

Now you can see the Total Amount is 0. This is because we set the renewal period for the 1st day of the month. The payment will be initiated only on that particular date.  

3. Prorate first payment

You may have seen this earlier while setting up our Nivea deodorant subscription product. 

Prorating the first payment allows you to charge the customer for the initial days till the first renewal date when subscription synchronization is enabled.

For example, if a customer places an order worth $100 per month on 15th March and the renewal period is set for the 1st day of the month. Then enabling the Prorate first payment option will allow you to charge the customer for the days between 15th March to 1st April. 

In our example, this will be 17 days. As March has 31 days the price will be calculated as 17 divided by 31x 100 ( $100, is the value of the product) gives you 0.54 x 100 = 54. So $54 will be charged for the initial days till the first renewal. Don’t worry you can skip the math as the Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin will automatically calculate the amount. 

Now let’s see how prorating the first payment works. This time let’s try a downloadable product. 

For the demo, let’s add Kaspersky Total Security as a downloadable subscription product. You can use any software or services using these steps.

Kaspersky Total Security product image

Go to Products > Add New.

Enter the product details and upload images.

Adding Kaspersky Total Security as a new product

Scroll down to the Product data meta box.

Select Simple subscription from the product data dropdown box. 

Click the Downloadable checkbox.

Enter the subscription details. (Price: $100 per month, Subscription length: Never expire, and leave others as blank)

Synchronising subscription for Kaspersky Total Security

We’ll set the Subscription synchronisation as 1st day of the month.

Now let’s enable the Prorate first payment checkbox.

Enabling prorate first payment option

As this is a downloadable product we have to add File Name, File URL, download limit, and expiry.  

Adding download links for Kaspersky Total Security

Publish to save the product.

Subscription page for Kaspersky Total Security

Let’s go to the product page and proceed to checkout. Now we can see the Total amount to pay is 13.33$, charged for 4 days, from April 27- May 1 { 4/30 (x100) }.

Billing details of Kaspersky Total Security

The renewal is set for the 1st of the month, so the next renewal will be on May 1st.

Checkout page of Kaspersky Total Security

Quick Tip: You can choose to prorate any type of product, but proration is most useful for virtual or downloadable products because virtual products are immediately accessible once subscribers sign up for a subscription.

We hope this article helped you to synchronize your subscription renewals to a specific date. In this way, you can manage all your subscription orders easily. This can be useful for both physical and virtual products. You may also be interested in reading our article on how to import export subscription orders in WooCommerce.

Are you selling physical or virtual products in your shop? How do you manage subscriptions in your store? Reply in the comment section.

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