How to Migrate Your Subscriptions to WooCommerce?

Often, an eCommerce platform finds it hard to support your subscription program. It becomes a struggle to manage your subscriptions. But, you don't need to stick around and optimize a difficult platform. All you need to do is transfer all the running and active subscriptions to WooCommerce. Once done, your subscription program will become easier to manage and regulate. Let's read on to find out more.

• WooCommerce Subscriptions - Highlights
• When Do You Need Migration?
• Why WooCommerce Subscription?
• WooCommerce Subscription Migration Challenges
• WooCommerce Subscription Migration – Workflow
• Migrating WooCommerce Subscriptions - Infographic
• What Virtina Does?
• What Does the WooCommerce Migration Involve?
• Final Thoughts - WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions - Highlights

WooCommerce too, allows its store owners to conduct subscription-based selling. Store owners can get consistent revenue for their online business. To start the same, it uses the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

With the help of WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can manage products for repeat payments. Such payments will give long lasting revenue. Furthermore, owners can track, manage and analyze their subscription program. Use the WooCommerce Subscription plugin to manage your subscriptions best.

The plugin supports a variety of subscriptions. The best part, it offers support for both physical or virtual products and services. Store owners can create these subscriptions for a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. Beyond this, it offers the ability to add sign-up fees, offer free trials, and set end dates.

Depend only on WooCommerce Subscriptions. It is the best way to track, manage, adjust and scale your subscription program. Currently, the plugin costs  $199/annum. The premium version of the plugin offers full updates and support. Owners will receive the following benefits.

• Several schedules and support from 25+ payment gateways for auto payments.
• Also supports manual renewal payments through any WooCommerce Payment Gateway.
• Provides auto rebilling on failed subscription payments.
• Give the control to the subscribers – ability to upgrade/downgrade or take free trials.
• Built-in renewal notifications and automatic emails to act as reminders.
• Detailed reports to keep track of everything.
• Get WooCommerce Variable Subscription. Also, get WooCommerce monthly subscription. 

When Do You Need Migration?

Many eCommerce platforms do not meet or scale according to the owner's expectations. This may be because the platform does not provide the necessary functionalities. Some of these eCommerce platforms become outdated and stop providing any value.

Often eCommerce store owners wish to escape an outdated selling setup. Sometimes they find themselves worrying about the complexity of their legacy platform. All they would want is an opportunity to move the entire website to another platform. A platform that is easier to manage, more secure, and more future-proof.

In such a scenario, owners choose to migrate to another platform. The process of migration is intricate and often leads to loss of data. All the entities get transferred to the new platform. Owners can't afford to rush their migration. They'd need to pay attention and avoid any premature actions. The last thing you'd want is data corrupting or data loss.

Preserve the entities. Then, keep their relations in order when moving from the source store to the target store. On top of that, you need to take care to ensure zero feature loss during your migration project.

Beyond this, preserve SEO URLs & create 301 redirects where need be. Carry out the whole process without any downtime. Safeguard all the personalization settings, reviews and ratings. Migrate the reward points and keep the unique order IDs of each subscription in the new platform. 

Why WooCommerce Subscription?

eCommerce store owners allow customers to automate product purchases. They set this weekly, monthly, or annual intervals. Due to this, customers don’t need to keep ordering the same set of products, through a manual process. It's a great way to streamline and simplify repeat purchases. 

The subscription is valid for a product or group of products. It acts as a future agreement between purchasers and merchants. Some store owners even allow modifications to certain variables of the eligible products. For this customers don't need to take a new subscription. But some owners aren't as flexible. They lock the subscriptions and don't let customers change it midway.

All the recipient needs to do is - set the time, duration, quantity, and other variables. Once the billing gets done, transactions carried out, the products start getting delivered. The subscribers sit back and await the product’s arrival – with no need to renew the subscription.

Plus, you’d get the following benefits with a subscription program on WooCommerce.

• Loyal customers who’d stay for longer – increase the lifetime value.
• Recurring opportunity to promote miscellaneous products.
• Consistent revenue with minimal sales efforts - residual revenue.
• Get steady and predictable sales.
• Free your marketing and sales team  to focus on new potential customers.
• Boosts customer engagement.

WooCommerce Subscription Migration Challenges

Migrating a subscription is problematic. On top of that, a subscription stays linked to a product, customer, payment gateway, and a group of orders. As such, migrating it gets even more difficult. Not to mention the risk of corrupting the data.

You need to ensure that the migration subscription gets carried out with utmost diligence. Owners must look to avoid all the common migration pitfalls. They could also miss transferring all the pending orders.

Owners could also lose customer history, which could impact their business. To avoid this, it’s essential to take a complete backup of all the data. Understand how you have mapped the fields. Once done, confirm and test the data to ensure things are in place.

Each of the subscribers are running on various forms of subscriptions. May be even with varying auto-renewal times and end dates. Far more important, is the payment information linked to their bank accounts. The link is what makes the auto-renewal possible.

Thus, at no point should the migration process deduct any payment from the customer. Nor, should it trigger an extra subscription on top of the pre-existing on. Outside of this, you may face some issues with supporting apps, and few pages might break. Your site ranking could also take a hit on search engines. 

WooCommerce Subscription Migration – Workflow

The entire migration exercise is not an overnight one-step procedure. There isn't a workable swift solution to move all your subscriptions in one-shot. Instead, it is a mammoth task that gets carried out in careful steps. The last thing you want is to make a mess of your subscription data.

Here’s the chain of events that take place.

1. Discovery

An early call and support from a WooCommerce subscription specialist. We get into the crux of your requirements. This helps us to conduct a holistic analysis. From there on, we work to create an optimal subscription migration strategy for your site.

2. Plugin Installation

We install and set up WooCommerce, and WooCommerce Subscriptions. We will also install any other supporting plugins if needed. Furthermore, we compile customer data and payment data into a CSV sheet. During this stage, we capture the right subscription and payment information.

3. Migration

We import your customers, products, and orders. We also import the meta information onto the new subscription module. During this stage, we’ll carry-over all your pre-paid subscriptions. Furthermore, we'll ensure a secure transfer of the entire customer data. Our experts ensure that all the data gets mapped in the right way.

4. Testing and Delivery

Our diligent quality assurance team gets to work. They probe and inspect the work to ensure glitch-free results. The effort in this stage ensures your site has 99.9% uptime. You don't face any interruptions on your subscriptions. Further, from this, we’ll do all the necessary order counts.

5. Support

We stick around to make sure you have all the help you need with your subscriptions. Once our experts have completed the work, your subscription would work as normal. Subscribers would get to manage, edit, skip, update, and add-to existing orders themselves.

Migrating WooCommerce Subscriptions - Infographic

What Virtina Does?

The WooCommerce experts at Virtina will perform a safe migration of your subscription plan. On top of that, they do so without losing any recurrent revenue. Our best migration practices ensure a hassle-free migration of subscriptions.

We have the experience of having migrated large websites. A lot of these websites contained thousands of orders, customers and subscriptions with different payment methods (Stripe, PayPal etc.). Furthermore, they also add varying taxes and Autoship intervals. But, our subscription specialists managed to move everything, without any loss.

Our migration workflow is meticulous and straightforward. Thus, all the current subscribers and active  subscriptions get migrated without any issues. Your users won’t notice any discrepancies. Other than the short downtime while replicating the changes onto your live site. 

Our Dedicated Migration Specialists will handle the entire process from start to finish. They make every effort to ensure that your migration is swift and successful. Our experts take special care to the following.

• Migrating automated recurring profiles (for PayPal, or Stripe) from another system. While migrating, we do NOT create any subscriptions. Nor do we create any extra charges. We use the “Subscription CSV” file, which includes the unique transaction IDs as well.
• We only start a manual workflow to import a subscription that wasn’t  transferred. In other words, all recurring subscriptions we import are real, and active subscriptions. These subscriptions are the ones already present in the payment gateway.

 At Virtina, we do everything from - helping with CSV formatting, and fixing broken renewals. We also deal with any issues with incorrect subscriptions. Besides, importing, and syncing subscribers with their membership plan. Once done, we import all the subscriptions to the WooCommerce site.

What Does the WooCommerce Migration Involve?

Often, you get subscription projects that involve the use of only one payment gateway. This didn’t need us to do a lot with regards to moving the critical payment details.

All we needed to do was make use of the tokens on the merchant end and the tokens sitting on the customer side. The use of tokens, meant, we could retrieve the billing information. The billing info connects to the recurring payments. The payments stay stored on the servers of the Payment processor.

Since, the tokens are the same regardless of the platform or technology in use. All we had to do was capture the tokens in the database of the old eCommerce site. From there, link them with the customers and then insert them into the new WooCommerce site. Once in place, they behaved like tokens that generated there in the first place.

Once that was in place, all the payment options added through the old site showed up in their profiles. Not only that, but all the renewals also continued to go through without any interruption.

Final Thoughts - WooCommerce Subscriptions

The migration experts at Virtina are your best bet to move your subscription program. We will transfer every entity of your subscription program. Our experts can help migrate the customers, products, orders and much more. In fact, we will also help to keep the relationship between every entity. 

Virtina has, in the past, carried out the task of migrating WooCommerce subscriptions. A whole lot of them consisted of a vast number of users with different renewal times and products. Yet, the Woo Experts managed to transfer everything to the WooCommerce store.

Virtina is the pioneer in any Subscription related matter. The Woo experts at Virtina are the ideal choice for your Subscription migration. Our experts will help you save time, money, and effort. They all take the fastest process and give the lowest error rate.

WooCommerce Subscriptions Migration - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)