In today’s write-up, we’ll discuss extensively the various complexities that arise while carrying out a subscription migration to WooCommerce from another platform.
If you are into subscriptions based selling on any other platform & have now decided to re-platform to WooCommerce, then all the running and active subscriptions will also need to be moved to WooCommerce & integrated with WooCommerce subscriptions.
Not only this, but you need to ensure that this process is carried out with utmost diligence - avoiding all the common migration pitfalls.
Subscription Commerce
eCommerce store owners allow customers to automate product purchases – on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. Due to this, the customers don’t need to keep ordering the same set of products manually - a great way to streamline repeat purchases.
The subscription is valid for a product or group of products & acts as a future agreement between purchasers & merchants. Some store owners even allow modifications to certain variables of the eligible products (without the need to take a new subscription), whereas others keep it locked.
All the recipient needs to do is - set the time, duration, quantity, and other variables – once the billing is done, transaction carried out, the products start getting delivered. The subscribers sit back & await the product’s arrival – with no need to renew the subscription.
Plus you’d get the following advantages of running subscriptions on your eCommerce store.
- 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 & predictable sales
- Marketing and sales team are freed to focus on new potential customers
- Boosts customer engagement
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WooCommerce, too allows its store owners to conduct subscription-based selling and get residual revenue for their business. To facilitate the same, it uses the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin.
With the help of WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can create & manage products for recurring payments — payments that will give lasting revenue, which the companies can easily track & rely on.
The plugin supports a variety of subscriptions for physical/virtual products and services. The subscriptions can be created for a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. Beyond this, it offers the ability to add sign-up fees, offer free trials, or set expiration periods.
Currently, the plugin is priced at $199/annually, with full updates and support offered, and this is what the plugin brings to the table.
- Multiple billing schedules & support from 25+ payment gateways for auto payments
- Also supports manual renewal payments through any WooCommerce Payment Gateway
- Provides auto re-billing on failed subscription payments
- Give the control to the subscribers – ability to upgrade/downgrade or take free trials
- Built-in renewal notifications & automatic emails to act as reminders
- Detailed reports to keep track of everything
When Do You Need Migration?
Many eCommerce platforms do not meet or scale according to the owner's expectations. This may be because the current platform does not provide the necessary functionalities/features to support their business plans or cease to provide any value.
Often eCommerce store owners wish to escape an outdated selling setup or find themselves worrying about the complexity of their aging site. All they would want is an opportunity to move the entire webshop to something 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 need to be carefully moved to the new platform – to avoid corrupting the data & causing any loss.
All the entities & their relations must be preserved when migrating the same 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, ensure the whole process is carried out without any downtime. Safeguard all the Personalization Settings, Reviews & Ratings, migrate the reward points and retain the unique order ID's of each subscription in the new platform.
Migration Challenges Involved
Migrating subscription is problematic, and because a subscription is linked to a product, customer, payment gateway, and potentially an order or group of orders - migrating a subscription gets even more difficult. Not to mention the risk of corrupting the data.
Naturally, you could miss out on pending orders or lose customer history - directly negatively impacting the business. To avoid this, it’s essential to take a complete backup of all the data, understand how fields are mapped, then validate & test the data to ensure things are in place.
Each of the subscribers is running on various forms of subscriptions, with varying auto-renewal times and end dates. Most importantly, their payment information is linked to their accounts – which made the auto-renewal possible.
Thus, at no point should the migration process deduct any payment from the customer or trigger an additional subscription on top of pre-existing on. Outside of this, you may face some issues with supporting apps, few pages might break & your site ranking could take a hit.
WooCommerce Subscription Migration – Workflow
The entire migration exercise is not an overnight one-step procedure that’ll instantly move all your subscriptions. Instead, it is a mammoth task that needs be carried out expertly to avoid making a mess of your subscription data.
Here’s the chain of events that take place.
1. Discovery
An early call and support from a subscription specialist. We get into the crux of your requirements to formulate an optimal subscription migration strategy for your site.
2. Plugin Installation
We install and setup WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and any other supporting plugins. Also, compile customer data and payment data into a CSV sheet. During this stage, we ensure that the right subscription and payment information is captured.
3. Migration
We import your customers, products, orders, and meta information onto the new subscription module. During this stage, we’ll carry-over of all your pre-paid subscriptions and ensure a secure transfer of your entire customer data. We ensure that the data is mapped correctly.
4. Testing & Delivery
Our diligent quality assurance team probes and inspects our solution to ensure elite bug-free results. The effort in this stage ensures your site has 99.9% uptime, with no interruption to 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 work has been done - the subscription customers should be able to manage, edit, skip, update, and add-to existing orders themselves.
Migrating WooCommerce Subscriptions - Infographic
What Virtina Does?
Fortunately, our astute Woo experts in Virtina can perform seamless and lossless migration of your current subscription plan without losing any recurrent revenue. Our best migration practices ensure a hassle-free migration of WooCommerce subscriptions.
We possess the experience of having migrated large websites with thousands of orders, customers & subscriptions with different payment methods (Stripe, PayPal), taxes & autoship intervals with absolute success.
Our migration workflow is so meticulous that your current subscribers & active WooCommerce subscriptions will safely be migrated. Other than the short downtime while replicating the changes onto your live site - your users won’t notice any discrepancies.
Our dedicated migration specialists will handle the entire process from start to finish. They make every effort to ensure that your migration is swift & successful. Our experts take special care to the following.
- Migrating automated recurring profiles from another system. While migrating, we do NOT create any subscriptions or initiate any actual charges. Use the “Subscription CSV” file, which includes the unique transaction ID’s as well.
- Only manually import a subscription that wasn’t correctly transferred because of a gateway failure. In other words, all recurring subscriptions we import are real, active subscriptions currently found in the payment gateway.
At Virtina, we do everything from - helping with CSV formatting, fixing broken renewals, or other issues with subscriptions imported incorrectly, syncing subscribers with their membership plan – then import subscriptions to the WooCommerce site, connected via the payment gateway.
What does the WooCommerce Migration involve?
There have been subscription projects in the past that involved the use of a particular payment gateway. The use of this didn’t require us to do a lot in terms of 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, we could retrieve the billing information for the recurring payments stored on the servers of the Payment processor.
Since, the tokens are the same regardless of the platform/technology in use. All we had to do was capture the tokens in the database of the old eCommerce site, link them with the customers & then insert them into the new WooCommerce site just like they were generated there in the first place.
Once that is in place, all the customer payment options that had been added through the old site showed up in their profiles and the renewals continued to go through without any interruption.
Conclusion
If your company is into subscription-based selling, has loads of customers tied to various subscription plans & wants to migrate them, then the migration pros in Virtina are your best bet to safely & securely move all the subscribers.
Virtina has, in the past, carried out the task of migrating WooCommerce subscriptions. A whole lot of them were made up of a vast number of users with different renewal times and products. Yet, the Woo Experts managed to transfer everything successfully.
Virtina is the pioneer in any subscription related matter. The Woo experts at Virtina are the ideal choice for your subscription migration – to save time, money, and effort when gaining the fastest process and the lowest error rate.
