Best Way To Sell and Manage Subscriptions on Your WordPress Site

There are numerous ways to sell and manage subscriptions on your WordPress site. How do you sift through all the noise and find the solution that answers your needs?

Don’t despair! In this post, we’ll introduce you to an all-in-one ecommerce solution that allows you to easily accept recurring payments and set up user accounts for your customers directly on your WordPress site. 

What Are Subscriptions?

In short, a subscription is a recurring payment for an ongoing service. This post delves into the best way to sell and manage subscriptions because they require much more attention to detail than capturing one-time payments.

There are a few types of subscription models your business might fit into: 

• Physical goods, such as an exclusive wine club that ships wine bottles to its customers once a month. 
• Software as a Service (SaaS), such as a paid WordPress SEO plugin. 
• Memberships that give customers access to exclusive content, such as online courses.  
• Newsletters and other publications that become available to subscribers regularly. 

What Are the Requirements for Selling Subscriptions?

Whether you’re selling subscriptions in WordPress or any other platform, you’ll want to have control over a few important features.

Stripe Payment Gateway for Taking Recurring Payments

A payment gateway is the only way to process and manage secure credit card transactions. Stripe, Square, PayPal, etc are all examples of payment gateways.

We use Stripe as the example in this post. Because it is one payment gateway that allows you to set up recurring payments very easily once a credit card is captured. 

Using your payment gateway, you can create a payment link to attach to a product you’re selling on your website.

Unless you code a payment form to your site, this link will redirect your customers away from your site to pay for your product. This is fine if you’re just trying to sell a one-off product without much intent to grow your business. 

User Management System for Modifying Customer Subscriptions

After the payment gateway, this is the most important feature to have if you’re selling subscriptions.

The User Management System gives your customers control over their accounts, allowing them to log in and modify their subscriptions.

In their user accounts, customers can see their past purchases, modify their orders, and update their credit card information. 

Many WordPress payment plugins offer this service as an additional paid plugin. This means that the added feature could slow down your website and affect its performance, not to mention that it would become much more expensive for you to maintain.

Therefore, the better way to sell and manage subscriptions is with a plugin, like the one mentioned below, that already comes with a built-in user management system. 

The alternative to WordPress plugins is to work directly from your Stripe account. In this case, your customers would not have control over their recurring payments should they need to change the credit card on file or modify their subscription level.

They would need to contact you to request these changes, and then you’ll log in to your Stripe account and manually modify the information. 

Using a WordPress payments plugin would make this process much quicker and simpler for both yourself and your customers. And as a bonus, it also happens to be a way to get customers to return to your site. 

User Onboarding To Reduce Churn and Encourage Subscription Renewals

Churn is the rate at which customers discontinue their subscriptions. An effective way to reduce churn is through your interaction with your customers at and following checkout. We call that interaction user onboarding.

It allows you to thank your customers for their purchases, explain how their products will be delivered to them, and continue an ongoing relationship with them to encourage them to renew their subscriptions and prevent refund requests.

Similar to user management systems, many WordPress payment plugins offer onboarding functions as additional paid plugins.

You could forgo plugins altogether and use the default Stripe settings to communicate with your customers, but the Stripe functionality is quite limited. You can only add your logo to a default checkout page, thank you page, and a simple email receipt.

Your customers will get only one automated message from Stripe regarding their purchase rather than a more personal and branded message from you.

Having onboarding functionality integrated into your WordPress payment plugin opens a communications line between you and your customers that’s invaluable for customer satisfaction and user retention. 

Branding for Consistency

Consistency throughout your site is an important way to keep customer engagement and build trust.

It’s therefore imperative to keep a consistent theme, layout, font, etc. (aka branding) on your blog posts, online store, onboarding pages, user management system, and all other pages on your site.

We’ve already established that you cannot control branding through your payment gateway without code, so you’ll need to find a WordPress payments plugin that includes this no-code feature.

For that, look no further than Mindspun Payments. 

Why Is Mindspun the Best Way To Sell and Manage Subscriptions in WordPress?

The answer is simple: Mindspun Payments offers all of the above – and more – in one WordPress plugin. The Mindspun alternatives, like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, require additional paid plugins for selling subscriptions.

This not only becomes more expensive, but it also adds complexity to your site and affects its performance. On the other hand, Mindspun Payments includes everything you need to sell in one lightweight plugin.

If you’re a small business, SaaS developer, or digital creator, Mindspun Payments should be on your radar. This all-in-one ecommerce solution allows you to sell not only SaaS subscriptions and memberships. But also digital downloads, software licensing, and more. 

Using Mindspun, you’ll be able to easily keep consistent branding throughout your site and in your onboarding pages using Responsive Blocks.

It even offers the ability to upsell and cross-sell, which isn’t a requirement per se, but it’s nice-to-have if you’re selling multiple products. And of course, your customers will be able to log in to an easy-to-use user management system.  

Conclusion

No matter the type of product you sell on your WordPress site, you’ll need a payment plugin that can connect to your payment gateway and offer branding and onboarding capabilities.

You will also need a user management system if you’re taking any kind of recurring payment. Whether it is a subscription for a certain product or a membership site.

Mindspun Payments does all of that and is, therefore, your all-in-one ecommerce solution to sell and manage subscriptions. 

Author Bio

Dolev Schreiber is the founder of DetourOn and a content writer for various travel blogs. Before settling down to a more sedentary and technical lifestyle, she worked nonstop as a tour guide in the National Parks of the American Southwest. She recently began selling PDF guidebooks on her WordPress site, which required a thorough payments plugin research journey.