All right, continuing in our Membership Site Building series, let’s talk about setting up recurring billing. Obviously, important for a Membership Site. So let’s get going. All right, so let’s dive in here. Now, in the approach we’re taking in this series, we’re obviously going to be using Woocommerce. That’s what we’ve been talking about this entire series so far. And I want to be clear, you guys already know this, that obviously, Woocommerce is not the only way to go. Woocommerce provides a lot of advantages. It’s super flexible. It’s also a GPL open source, and you have full control over your own code base. So for a lot of different reasons, I really prefer to use Woocommerce, and it’s what I use on pretty much all the sites that I build. I don’t use a dedicated membership site plugin, like Member Press or something like that. Unless the client comes in with that one already, I would prefer not to use it. But there is a hitch, unfortunately, with Woocommerce, and that is that it doesn’t have the built-in ability to do subscriptions. Honestly, this is pretty much one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. It’s weird.

Therefore, it requires an add-on. It’s an unfortunate thing. There are different plugins that give Woocommerce subscription capability. I’ll show you the one I use. It’s probably the most common one is the one I use, but there are a few other options. And by the way, you can go out and Google these things and look around because there’s other ones as well. But one that’s pretty well known is this Y-I-T-H, Woocommerce Subscription. I forgot what the heck that ITH stands for, frankly. But anyway, this is a nice plugin from what I have seen. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with it. Of course, it does come with a cost. Most of these things do at $1. 99 a year. And But it’s a good plugin. It’s one of those types of things, I will say, with regard to cost on these plugins, is just keeping in perspective the amount of money that you can make with a subscription plan. These things are actually pretty cheap, given what you can do. And so I wouldn’t get too hung up on the price, especially if you’re going to need their support, which is what you’re paying for.

Now, Woocommerce subscriptions is probably the most popular one, and it happens to be the one that I use as well. Now, this one is… They keep It’s amazing the price, unfortunately, but it comes in at 279 bucks per year. Kind of pricey, to be honest with you, but keep in mind, it is GPL open source, and what you’re basically paying for is the updates and the support, which I literally have never needed their support ever. So it’s one of those things. One of the things I like about Woocommerce in general, and it’s because it’s got digital sovereignty, which is something that’s really important to me. That is that if you If you stop paying for this or if you just didn’t pay for it in the first place, let’s be honest, it will still work. It will still work because the way that WooCommerce subscriptions works, you’re not relying on a third party service to trigger the renewals. Your site’s doing it. Everything is in-house, and that’s one of the things about WooCommerce that I find to be so important. Now, there is another one that I recently came across, much newer solution. I just wanted to point it out, but it’s called Stellar Pay, and it’s from the guys at Stellar W WP, which is the same team behind Cadence Theme, LearnDash, things like that.

Now, this is a freebie, and it looks really cool. It’s actually got one of the best user interfaces I’ve ever seen. It works only with Stripe. When you go in there, you can actually interact with your Stripe account right from inside of WordPress via the API that that plugin is using. You could see things like your account balance, the payments being sent to your bank account, and all that. But one of the cool One of the things with regard to subscriptions is that it supports subscription payments right out of the gate. It’s also pretty different in the way that Woocommerce Subscriptions works, in that Woocommerce Subscriptions controls the subscription in-house and triggers everything from your WordPress site. And so from the perspective of Stripe, it’s just individual payments being made. With Stellar Pay, you’re actually using Stripe’s built-in capability of managing subscription. And so your subscriptions are actually going to be being controlled by Stripe, and it’s just going to be reporting back to WordPress that everything is okay. Very different way of doing it, and one of the reasons why it’s free, because it’s basically just using Stripe’s capability of doing subscriptions. But cool plugin.

Now, I personally use Woocommer subscriptions, as I mentioned, and unfortunately, you’re going to find, like I said, that these good subscription add-ons are not free. It’s just the way that it is. But They are GPL open source, but you pay for the support and the updates. That’s how they work. Now, when you go to create your product in WU, you’re going to have options to turn it into a subscription. I’ll show you that on screen in just a second. Now, I want you to keep in mind that this is just for the purposes of billing. We’re going to be using WP Fusion to handle the permissions. This is an inherently different thing than a traditional membership site plugin, where you have member levels and all that stuff. We are not using WUCommerce subscriptions to grant them access to anything. All we’re going to be using WUCommerce subscriptions for is to do the recurring billing. And then with WP Fusion’s integration into it, we can assign tags to their profile and then therefore grant them permissions to things, trigger certain automations, and things like that. Okay? So let’s go to screen and let me show you what we’re doing.

All right, So over to our practice membership site we’ve been building. First of all, if you go to our list of plugins and go on down, you’ll see that we have WooCommerce subscriptions enabled. Now, under WooCommerce settings, and we’ll also just click on this as a shortcut, you do have some settings for this plugin for things like your add to cart buttons and this type of stuff. You can control some of the timing, whether you want the enable automatic retry failed recurring payments. I usually keep that one turned on. Woocommerce Subscriptions does have an automatic schedule in place to retry failed payments for renewals. And I don’t worry about modifying it. It is possible to modify it, but I think it starts off, and if it fails, then 12 hours later, it’s going to do it again. I believe it tries it again after another 12 hours, and then 24 hours, and then 48, and then 72. I think that’s how it works by default, and I don’t see any real reason to modify it, so I don’t, okay? Do you want to have notification emails for renewals and expirations? You can check that off.

Do you want to accept manual renewals where you can allow them to come in here when a subscription is on hold and basically manually pay it? And you can go right on down the line here. So it’s got some interesting things. Now, this thing about subscription switching is an interesting one. It can be a little weird, to be honest, to get us a set up. But basically, this is where you can allow a person to to upgrade or downgrade plans. And so basically, let’s say they’re on the monthly, you want them to be able to upgrade to an annual and prorate it. That’s what these things do, a subscription switching. Now, the way that it works, though, you It’s very specific about how you set up that product. You need to use a certain type of product, which I will show you in just a second. But there’s some settings here on this screen that you can get set up, and it’s a pretty flexible system. Now, what we’re going to do is go over to our products page, and then we just show you. We do have two practice products that were set up in here previously, monthly and annual.

And let’s go into the monthly here. And you’ll see that this right here is just called a simple subscription. And basically, I check this box to say it’s a virtual product that basically gets all the inventory stuff shut off because we don’t need inventory for something digital. And then I say I want to do $10 every month. Okay, $10 a month. Now, obviously, you can do every second, third. You got a lot of control here. And then you can also do different frequencies, day, week, month, or year. Obviously, usually monthly and annual are the most common. But if you have something where you needed to make it more frequent, you do have that ability to do it. Let’s go back over here. This is if you want to have, I say, a payment plan. So for example, let’s say it was $10 a month, but after six months, you want to stop. That’s what you could do here. So this is really good for setting up payment plans, and it goes out to 24 months, which is usually more than adequate for most people. So I’ve seen people where they will launch an online course, and they will have a product that is an upfront price, and then they will have another one that offers a payment plan.

This would It’s going to be your way for doing a payment plan. Okay, so let’s get rid of that. Now, a sign-up fee is pretty self-explanatory. You’re going to charge them a fee upfront to join. Most sites don’t do this, but sometimes they do, like a set a signup fee, that type of thing. And so you could charge this. And what it will do is, let’s say that I plugged in a hundred bucks here as a signup fee, then when a person joins this membership, they’re going to be charged 110. That’s because it’s going to charge a signup fee plus the first month. And then it will go $10 a month after that. So that’s what the signup fee does. And then free trial, once again, self-explanatory. Do you want them to have a free trial? I don’t usually use free trials, but some sites do. And you could do, say, a 30 It’s 30-day free trial. Okay? Self-explanatory yet again. And then the sale price would be basically if you would like to say, Oh, it’s normally $10 a month, but for this month only, it’s nine, or something like that. You could totally do app, and then when they’re actually going through the checkout process, it will actually show it, and in their cart, it will actually show that it’s normally 10, but it’s been marked down to nine.

Now, one other thing I wanted to show you here because it does get more complicated, I usually use simple subscription, but there is also the option for variable subscription. Now, so let me show you this. I’m going to go in and create a new product, and let’s call this variable. We’re not going to actually do it, but in this market virtual. Now, let’s go down to variable subscription. Now, this is a little bit more complicated than how it works. Frankly, see, if you go down to variations, there’s nothing there. So what we need to do first is go to attribute attributes. Let’s call this term, I don’t know, used for variations, and we’re going to say monthly. And then I think we have to do that. I’m going out of memory here. It’s like a little character there. Let’s see if I did that create. See what it did? I created an attribute to the product. I call it the term. Then I said we’re going to use that for variations. All right. And then when I came over to variations, there was still nothing there. I had to automatically generate it. And here we have now monthly and annual.

So then when you go down to this, you click on Edit and you can pop into here and say, well, our monthly is going to be $10 a month. Okay, and you got a lot of these same options from before. I need to get all this inventory stuff out of here. And then close that one. And then down here to annual, if it’s $10 a month, let’s say it’s $99 for the year. Basically, what it is, is now you have one product that offers either monthly or annual terms. You can do other ones as well. And by the way, with WP Fusion, with these subscriptions, you’ve got all of your tag capabilities in here. So when they sign up for the monthly plan, they would automatically get a certain tag. This is important to understand because if you want to allow subscription switching later to allow them to switch between monthly and annual, it does need to be set up this way. It’s a little bit more complicated, but that’s the way it works. You cannot take a simple subscription, I think, especially once it already has people that have subscribed to it, you cannot turn it in to a variable subscription.

If you have two separate subscription subscription products like I do over here, if I have two separate subscription products like this, monthly and annual, the plugin currently does not allow you to switch between them. Okay? Meaning if a monthly person decided to come in and subscribe as an annual, well, what’s going to happen is they’re going to have two subscriptions, and you’d have to cancel one of them. There’s just these little flukes about WooCommerce subscriptions that you’re going to have to know and understand. Most of the time, this stuff is pretty simple because we don’t really build complex setups. But these are some of the little intricacies of using Bluecommerce subscriptions. Now, if we go back to our monthly, our simple subscription monthly, I wanted to show you this WP Fusion settings. Now, I want to really quickly point out the Fluent CRM settings as well, because there are some things that you can do without WP Fusion even being in the mix. And some of the important ones you’ve already got. See how we can add tags on these different failed actions and all that. So wooCommerce and Fluent CRM integrate with one another, and it’s really nice.

And so you might ask the question, why do we not just use that? Why do we need WP Fusion? Well, it’s a good question, and that is because of permissions. I typically use WP Fusion to control access to all the various parts of the membership site. Fluent CRM cannot do that. And so that’s why I just go ahead and use the WP Fusion integration myself. Now, if I were to add tag here using the Fluent CRM integration, it’s not as if WP Fusion won’t obey it. So if I set those tags that they were required to access certain content across the site, it will still work. But typically, I don’t use the Fluent CRM integration here. What I usually do is pop down here and I do it here. So it’s pretty self-explanatory. When they buy this subscription, we would add the member tag. If we want to add a tag, if they get a refund, we would do it. I don’t usually worry about it. If we want to add a tag when When their transaction failed, we can do it. I don’t usually worry about it. Why might you want to do that?

Well, maybe you want to build up a automation inside of Fluent CRM that when their transaction fails, you can try to go out there and rescue the sale. All right? That would be a reason you’d want to use it. Now for the subscription stuff, they have a whole bunch of other options. If you want to remove the tags, if the subscription is canceled, I usually check this because what would happen is if the status of the subscription cancels later or goes on hold or expires or anything like that, whatever tags I stick up here will automatically be removed. In this case, the members tag would be removed automatically, which makes a lot of sense because we would want to then remove their access to the member material. But then you have these other tags. If a payment fail, you can add a tag to their profile. These are not usually tags that will stay on the person’s profile. I usually use them as trigger tags. What will happen is I add the tag to their profile, it will trigger an automation inside the CRM to let them know their payment failed. Now, they are going to get receipts from Woocommerce.

So they’re going to get something from Woocommerce already, saying their payment failed. But I usually like to set up my own automation as well. That way, I’m also talking to them in my own words and move it along. Same thing with cancelation. If they cancel, you probably don’t want to remove them from your database. You probably want to tag them as canceled so that you can then possibly do a follow-up marketing with them later, get them to rejoin, something like that. If the subscription goes on hold, if a payment fails and it goes on hold, you can tag them. Same basic thing. Pending cancelation expired, and if their trial ends. These are all really good opportunities to add a trigger tag, which you can then build an automation for. Now, to be honest, I don’t usually use all these things. I do use cancel. I do use the one about going I think it’s either payment field or the one about going on hold, which often will happen at the same time anyway. But I don’t use a lot of these other ones because I don’t need to barrage everybody with emails. I don’t even use free trials.

And then this one here for subscription fields, this is when you want to start matching things up to WP Fusion, like the name of the membership they’re on, the start date of their membership. If they were on a payment plan and there’s an end date, you can match that to a field inside your CRM and then use those things later or just have it for your own records. So that’s pretty much how you set up WU commerce subscriptions. It’s got a few little intricacies, but it’s really not all that complicated. Well, especially once you’ve done it a little bit, okay? And it’s got other things to know. You can get a little creative with some of these things. For example, one thing I forgot to mention was that the pro-rated upgrades from, say, monthly to annual and that type of thing. Usually, the variable subscription products is your best way to do that. However, there is an option called grouped products, where you can group individual monthly and annuals together, and there is a way where the person could swap between them as long as they’re within the same group. And so there are options.

You can go and look at the WU commerce subscriptions documentation to learn more. But generally speaking, most of our sites are pretty simple, and we just put a monthly and annual plan in there, something like that. Myself, for concierge, I don’t even do annual plans. It’s strictly monthly, nice and simple, and it just does its thing. Now, one other thing that I wanted to mention for you is the idea of the renewals and how they trigger, because with WuCommerce subscriptions, your website is actually responsible for triggering renewal payments. The way that it controls the scheduling for that is using WP Cron, which is a schedule task system that’s built into WordPress. Now, by default, the way that that is going to be triggered is by site traffic. So meaning as long as your website has some activity on it, then it’s going to trigger whatever schedule tasks are necessary, and those renewals will be one of them. Now, in the interesting scenario in which case you might be using a WordPress site, you have some Woocommerce subscriptions in place, you need things to be renewed on time, but let’s say the thing’s not getting that much traffic.

You might have an issue where the renewals don’t get triggered on time. And so what you’d want to do is not rely on the traffic to the WordPress site to trigger those things and to keep the heartbeat going, you’re going to want to use what’s called cron on your actual server in order to trigger that thing. And so basically, you tell your server to automatically ping WP AP cron, say, every minute or every five minutes or something like that, and it will just do its thing. Now, maybe I’ll make another video about that one later. It’s also important, frankly, for Fluent CRM, because when you have marketing automations where you need to trigger things out on time and send emails out at certain times, you need that heartbeat to keep on going. Sometimes you need to swap over and start using the server cron in order to make sure those things go out like they’re supposed to so that it’s not dependent on your site’s traffic to trigger it. Anyways, maybe I’ll get into another video down the road, and I can get into that one because that’s a different topic altogether. But that’s how you set up recurring billing on your membership site.

It’s, at the end of the day, not that complicated. I just went into some ins and outs for you in case they might be relevant. All right, that wraps up this one. Once again, if you would like any help setting any of this stuff up on your membership site, get in touch with me over at blogmarketingacademy. Com, and I will be happy to help you out. This is what I do all day, so I can do it in my sleep at this point, especially using the tools that we’re talking about in this series. So happy to help you out. Just get in touch and we can talk it out. Okay, with that being said, I will see you on the next video in this series. We’ve covered a lot of ground here in this series on building a membership site, but there are some other things we’re going to cover, getting into some little details and stuff like that. And then maybe I’ll take some input from YouTube comments and stuff like that, maybe from my subscribers with the WP Edge over at the wpedge. Com, and get some questions, and maybe I’ll make some custom videos just about some specific things, because obviously, building a membership site, it’s got all kinds of little things that we could do here.

I’m not going to make a series that covers every single facet of it, but I’m happy to take questions and perhaps turn that into another video. All right? With that being said, I will see you on the next one.