Subscriptions that ship on a different schedule to billing e.g. pay annually, ship monthly.
It is very common for companies to allow a customer to pay up front for a subscription and still receive the product monthly. It would be great to have this option in the subscription plug-in. Payment settings and how often the product ships should be separate settings.

191 comments
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Laurence commented
My client offers a monthly subscription, but allows add-ons that affect a weekly delivery schedule.
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Christina Brady commented
I have a product i wish to ship quarterly on set months April, July, Oct, Jan but a customer may sign up in March leading to their next payment being June with the shipping in July. It would be great to synchronise these so if a customer signs up midway it automatically takes to payment to the shipping month next scheduled.
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Mustafa Alyousef commented
This is a must!
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Oliver commented
Agree
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Anonymous commented
Would love to see this, please WooCommerce, make this happen!
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Alan commented
vote
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Alan commented
I need this to manage a quarterly magazine.
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Brian commented
Check this out... seems to be the best way to do this at the moment. https://woocommerce.com/products/all-products-for-woocommerce-subscriptions/?aff=46147&cid=5699243
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Anonymous commented
almost a year now and still this standard option is unavailable. Does anyone have any other Subscriptions solutions as we are now losing money due to using the sign-up fee option and need to move away from this basic plugin. The automate woo option doesn't work with variable subscription products.
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Ty commented
Patrick T — We ended up tracking subscription orders via Google Sheets manually. Woo only manages the initial order, payment, renewals, etc. When a renew order comes through our spreadsheet is updated with all the deliveries for that order and then marked as “completed.”
We have automated new customers and orders in Woo via Zapier to be inserted into the sheet, but subscription deliveries are still tracked outside of Woo.
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PatrickT commented
I'm currently setting up a woocommerce website for a paper magazine with 2 subscription options delivered quaterly: 6 magazines (18 months) or 12 magazines (3 years) subscriptions.
Reading the different comments here and the documentation, I understand that will be quite difficult to set up.
Could you suggest a way to set up this? -
nciek commented
We are a full 9-months past that date and still this functionality isn't possible in a plugin. The documentation for Woocommerce Subscriptions points to AutomateWoo with the Subscriptions Add-on. Looking at the documentation here:https://coffeehero.com.au/
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Jan D commented
I could really do with this, I just want my customers to have the option to pay in full or by installments, so this would work a treat, but I'm finding it hard to set up the simple and variable subscriptions at the same time....
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Ty commented
@Congruent Dev -- The issue is that, despite woo subscriptions billing themselves as having the capability to sell "magazine" subscriptions, they actually cannot. Think about how that model works. You pay annually, but get mailed something monthly. There is no way to do with with woo or woo subscriptions. You are required to have the same "bill" length as you have "delivery" length.
We sell produce on subscription, and want to bill monthly, but delivery weekly or bi-weekly. There is no way to do this easily, and not without spending another $100+ on top of a $200 subscriptions plugin for automate woo. Even then, we would need to set up multiple triggers for each product -- that's not tenable.
The way woo has it now, we would be required to bill weekly, or bi-weekly, if we wanted to deliver on that schedule /and/ have woo faithfully track all the orders. We're not billing our customers that frequently, it's bad form and bad business. This gets more complex if we wanted to offer quarterly or annual subscriptions like a CSA but still deliver weekly or bi-weekly.
Right now we're forced to use two platforms -- woo subscriptions for taking orders and billing ongoing, and another for tracking subscription deliveries and what we need to produce to fulfill those orders. If you have a solution to this issue we're all ears, but it seems like one is on the horizon, or was, at least, last July.
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Congruent Dev commented
https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/
what am i missing? -
Ty commented
How many votes are required to make ideas a development priority?
The last update, July 2019, indicated a short timeline. We are a full 9-months past that date and still this functionality isn't possible in a plugin. The documentation for Woocommerce Subscriptions points to AutomateWoo with the Subscriptions Add-on. Looking at the documentation here:
https://automatewoo.com/docs/examples/pre-paid-subscriptions/
Is this the "official" fix or will a plugin still be released as indicated last July?
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Anonymous commented
Can you please supply an update on this from July last year?
"So we are working on a "Custom Delivery Schedule plugin for WooCommerce subscriptions". The plugin can help you separate the billing & shipping cycles. So your subscription product price can be set to charge every year (or any other cycle), while the delivery can be monthly (or any other cycle)." -
Admin commented
yes, this would be amazing to be able to have separate shipping and billing cycles.
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nana he commented
yes!!! 1 year or 6 months
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Geoff Ross commented
this would be extremely useful