 Jersey, from a town called Galloway, just outside of Atlantic City. Anyone here have ever been to Atlantic City? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's fine. I was a hit before I did what I do now as a full-time musician for 10 years. I'm really excited to be back in Boston. I actually went to Berkeley College of Music right up the road. Cool. Yeah, so... Welcome home. Yeah, I'd love it. So, for the last 10 years I've owned a recording studio. I gigged, I taught kids how to play music, and I taught guitar, bass, and drums. I went to school for drum. And I was a music therapist and a nursing home. Who's the best job. But it was a lot of scrounging. I was working these pretty crazy long hours, and not making any money, and I got old. So, I kind of, by chance, started learning WordPress and I ended up getting really obsessed with it. So, fast forward a little bit. And I worked for Automatic, and I'm a happiness engineer at Blue Commerce. So, essentially what that means is I try to figure out what's wrong with Blue Commerce. So, I'm going to write in, either through live chat or through our email, to say that this is broken. And I have to figure out why. So, it's a technical troubleshoot pretty much all day, and I absolutely love it. And since Automatic is a completely distributed company, I can work from wherever I want to, as long as there's internet. So, I recently moved down to Marshall, North Carolina, just north of Asheville. It's great. I live in the mountains, and I can take pictures at height. And if you have questions about any of this, or just want to talk, I'm at the Blue Commerce, to get back downstairs. So, I'll say hi. So, first let's talk about why you'd want recurring payments over a one-time purchase. First of all, it's been working really well for a lot of big companies for a long time. But especially in the last few years, we've seen a boom in these types of recurring services. I mean, think about Spotify, Netflix, Dollar Shade Club, and all these like single meal box subscriptions, because they seem to be popping up everywhere. Like, does anyone here not have a subscription that they paid for? There's one. You don't have Netflix? No, but someone in your family has Netflix, and you still use that, right? Yeah. So, perks are typically a little bit more predictable or revenue stream, as a business owner. A lot of customers consider a sufficient billing to be more suitable for them, because they can choose a plan they want based on their needs. It's a little more a la carte with these plans. They can upgrade or downgrade their subscription or cancel this subscription if the service doesn't match their expectations. So, it's giving a little bit of power to the customer. And a one-time payment system is cheaper, but it's upfront costs. A lot of times are too much for a lot of people. So, a monthly subscription allows customers to use your service through less scary methods. Personally, I'd rather pay $10 a month than $120 at once. So, what's needed? First, WooCommerce. For those of you who aren't familiar with WooCommerce, it's free to use completely. It's free to download. You will never charge for a transaction. There's nothing scary hidden about it. Having said that, you do need a payment gateway. So, that would be Stripe or PayPal. They're the credit card processor of your site. And those payment gateways will always take some sort of money. Just like if you own a brick-and-mortar shop, they're still going to take a little percentage off the top. That's how they work. You're going to need a paid WooCommerce plugin called Subscriptions. And depending on your application, an extension called Memberships as well. But for now, we're just going to talk about subscriptions. And we'll get to Memberships in a little bit. So, Subscriptions is developed by a really cool company called ProsPress. And if you haven't looked into it, I highly suggest that ProsPress is a great company and their support is. Before we get talking about Subscription, you need to go half a step back and mention these payment gateways again. Payment gateways, like I said, are the credit card processors, but all of them are created equal. The payment gateway needs to have subscription integration specifically built into the plugin. So, that means even if the gateway supports recurring payments on its own, it may not support subscriptions. All right? And that's important to understand because we see a lot of people who say, well, I have this payment gateway, or it may not work with subscriptions. So, some of the more well-known ones are Stripe, FirstData, Authorize.netSim, and PayPal Express Checkout. As of now, there are about 25 official supported ones. Having said that, ProsPress has some pretty great documentation for developers to add subscriptions integration to an existing plugin. So, if you or your client is really stuck in a certain payment gateway, you can add that subscription integration into their payment gateway. And as a personal side note, I think it's really important to have multiple payment gate leads on your site. Some customers don't want to use anything but PayPal, for example, while others, like myself, may be completely turned off by the idea of having to create a PayPal account, which they force you to do now, no matter what. Even if you're just using your credit card, you don't need a PayPal account. We have to because it's a subscription. Not for full payments. I don't think you have to for a full payment. The WooCommerce PayPal extensions that I just tested this morning, they do. Yes, so I'm not... Again, that's why we want to have strike up their account. So, it's great to let the payment... or let the customers decide what they want to pay or how they want to pay. Also, I see that my credit card number is stolen all the time. So, I always end up changing the account name. There is a document, but it has a very long URL. I'll just give it to you later, to support my subscriptions. So, we're going to go over briefly how to set up WooCommerce subscriptions. It gets a little tedious, I will admit, but we see a lot of people getting some basic things really wrong. So, you install subscriptions like any other WordPress plugin. Nothing is scary there. So, after you install subscriptions, there's going to be two new product types. There's a simple and variable subscription. And these are similar to WooCommerce cores, simple and variable products. A simple subscription is just that. We're going to talk about this in a second. A variable product or subscription is a product type in WooCommerce that lets you spend various amounts of product with control over prices, stock, image, and other things, dimensions for each variation. So, think about this simply. They can be used for something like a shirt, or you offer small, large, medium, and green, red, and blue. So, that would be a variable product. So, you don't have to have nine different products or whatever. So, this is what the simple subscription screen looks like in WooCommerce. And as you can see, it's very similar to the simple product screen. Note that these subscriptions can be virtual and downloadable. If it's virtual, it means that it won't be shipped. And that shipping tab on the left will go away, just like your normal simple product. If it's downloadable, it means that there's a downloadable file attached to the product. So, we have the subscription price and how often it renews. And it's actually really important to know the flexibility available for these schedules. So, out of the box, subscriptions allows the following schedules. Every, every second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, day, week, month, or year. So, having a subscription that renews every five days or once every two years or any combination of those numbers is completely possible. The expire after field allows you to end the subscription after your current predetermined amount of time. So, any, you know, the subscription will have a maximum length. And once that expires, the subscription is no longer active. And the subscription will have to repurchase. Subscriptions that have never expired after that field, but it's up there, will just keep renewing as long as the payments are successful. Like Spotify. Signup fee is pretty self-explanatory. But one thing that's great about the subscription is the free trial. And it's important to know that this will get added to the total length of the subscription if it expires. So, for example, if you create a subscription of $5 per month for six months, and that's a subscription length, and with a one month free trial, the subscription will expire after a total of seven months. So, I think this is such a good way to get people hooked onto your products. Because if they can cancel anytime, it's a free trial, they have nothing to lose. Like, let's say, a free month I feel like they're more willing to sign up, again, because they have the control. They can cancel whenever they want. On a personal note, that's actually how it did get started with Amazon Prime and with Spotify. Like, once I had the free trials, I was completely hooked in. Actually, that's not even true. I forgot that I signed up for Amazon Prime. And it's been, like, four years now. But I just use it, so whatever. So, you can also, from the screen, set the schedule sales and things like that. And here's what a simple subscription will look like on the front end. So, this is using WooCommerce default storefront. Now, it's not the prettiest in the world, it's very simple. But what I like about storefront is that it's fast, it's unbelievably stable with WooCommerce. It's very easy to customize, and it's free, so that's even better. Here's what it will look like if you actually did, like, add in the free trial and sign up fee and all that jazz. So, of course, this is going to be customized or liking, and depending on your theme, it may show this differently. But again, this is default behavior using subscriptions. So, since variable subscriptions and WooCommerce are similar to Core's variable products, all the subscription information is set at the variation level. So, first, we're going to add attributes to the subscription. So, in this case, I like doing this. This is for, like, a recurring donation for a nonprofit, let's say. In this case, we're going to do a subscription that has a variable renewal frequency. So, this will allow the customer to select how often they want to pay. But we're going to do one month, six months, and yearly. We need to make sure that they're visible and they're used for variations. And once we can do that, we're going to create variations from these attributes. So, now, in essence, we have three different subscription products. I want to have the cost of the subscription to be $20 a month. $100 for six months or $200 a year. So, that will give, like, the yearly subscribers a nice little discount. And here's what it looks like editing these variations. So, right now, I'm editing the monthly recurring subscription. And clicking on those arrows will allow me to edit the bi-annual yearly subscription. This is how it looks for the customer. Of course, clicking on the renewal frequency drop-down will change the price. It's also important to note that you can have multiple variations for subscription products as well. But for the sake of time, I'm trying to make this as simple as possible. Subscriptions is insanely, like, the amount of possibilities you have with this extension is very impressive. So, we're going bare bones today. Remember, if you add things like sign-up fees or free trials, they'll also show on this product page. So, here's what it will look like in the cart for your customer. Again, using storefront. It tells them what to do today and when the first renewal is happening. And now, after this subscription is purchased, they're going to have a nice new subscriptions area in their My Account page. So, again, it's important to note that the customers have the power. They can change their payment method, cancel their subscription at any time. They can change the payment sorry, the recurring frequency. And we'll get to that in a minute. And I feel like when the customers have the power it inspires a little more confidence in the product and the company they're doing business with. The organization, in this case. On the admin side, there's a few new things that are worth mentioning. So, heading to Lou Conner's subscriptions from your dashboard, we'll bring you to this page. So, we can see the status of the subscription, the subscription number and the customer name, what they purchased and the details of their payment schedule. So, what's great about this is you have the same functionality as the Lou Conner's core bulk editor too. And when dealing with these subscriptions you can search by payment methods. They're just seeing people who've paid by stripe or paid pal or first aid or whatever and searching for a product or for a customer. It's I have a lot of control over this one screen. Here's the subscription detail page. As you can see, again, very similar to Lou Conner's core. So, we have customer subscription status and I don't think this user gave us the real address or email address. But I guess we won't know. It tells us the payment method. This here we can also apply coupons after the fact. Shipping details if there's anything to be shipped. And while you can do the normal Lou Conner's order details functions like resending a customer email or regenerating downloadable permissions or anything like that. You also alter the status of the subscription to on hold, canceled, expired all that. But this area I think is really, really useful. This is where the admin can alter the billing schedule and it lets you manually change the parameters of the subscription. Now to be honest, I mostly love this feature just for the sake of customer service. So in this, I didn't explain this let's say someone that guy named Tyrese Baguetti and he ordered a subscription of meatball pizza bowls delivered to his house guaranteed not fresh. But he wasn't satisfied with his last order and he contacts me complaining about his meatball pizza bowls. So using this function I'll add just a random free month to this trial. I can extend this subscription for that extra month and just to ease and to make sure that you don't lose a customer, everybody's happy. So new email types we have a lot of new ones that go into when adding new comments subscriptions all of these can be customized extended using a plugin like follow-up emails or something like that we'll get to that. So there are four new coupon types that come with subscriptions as well free discount signed up for your percentage discount and same with recurring products. And you know who loves coupons? Literally everyone. So I think it's such a great way to reward loyal customers and introduce new ones to your products. Just for a side note we just had our 10 year anniversary like last week and we gave out these 10 years of wool coupons and it was like one of our highest sales ever so we were really excited about that. People love coupons let's give them out. I think it's also such a great way for your customers to upgrade their subscriptions and when we talk about upgrades and downgrades WooConner subscriptions actually calls it switching. I don't know why they wouldn't call it upgrading or downgrade I didn't write the plugin. So heading to WooConner settings subscriptions we'll see like a cornucopia of new settings but this little area called switching is particularly important. As it says switching will allow your subscribers to upgrade or downgrade between different subscriptions. And I know this is a little tedious but I am going to go through these settings because everyone gets them wrong all the time. So I wanted to try to avoid these downfalls and then everybody contacting support. So allow switching has four options. Switch from one subscription variation to another within the same variable subscription. So if it's a variable subscription like our recurring donation from earlier this will allow the customer to go from one plan to another without the need to cancel or re-sign up. Switch from a subscription in a group product to any simple subscription within that group product. But this involves a WooConner's extension called group products and again for disabled time we're just going to ignore that. And switch between both of the above and never. So if you just want to allow your customers to switch between subscription levels just keep it on and switch between both of the above. If you want to keep things just on the simple side switch from one subscription variation to another within the same category. Recurring payments and you may ought to have subscriptions charge or credit the customer for the difference between two subscriptions when they choose a subscription with a different recurring or payment billing period and the pro rating of the sign up fee. So you can choose to charge the full sign up fee whenever switching a new subscription. A customer receives no credit for any sign up fee paid on the current subscription. So this is actually useful when the sign up fee is to use to cover something physical like you're shipping an item for a new subscription. Finally you can choose to charge a customer the difference between two sign up fees when switching the new subscription. So if you choose to always pro rate the sign up fee then they are only charged the difference between the two sign up fees when switching to a new subscription with a sign up fee higher than the one paid for the current subscription. Per subscription length similar. So let's do for example let's say a customer signed up for a 12 month subscription 4 months ago. So 4 payments have been completed. The customer now lets upgrade to a different subscription that also has a length of 12 months. If the store is configured to pro rate the new subscription will only charge 8 additional payments 1 month apart before expiring. And the switch button text is what shows in the user's mouse subscription page. It will now show this handy little button. Upgrade or downgrade that's very simple. Again we can customize that text. Briefly talk about another WooCommerce expansion called Memberships and good news you don't have to pro rate anymore. Memberships is developed by a company called Skyverge. It is another paid extension. And there's a few as a side there's a few extensions that do similar things as WooCommerce as subscriptions and memberships. But I like these they are tried and true. And what I look for when recommending plugins or extensions is how often there's a cause of an issue and it seems like these are very rarely the actual cause of issues. And I know that there's support of Skyverge and ProsPress for both really great very hands on and fast. So I but again there's I know there's other membership plugins I'm not saying. Putting in my two cents here. So why memberships is needed? Depending on your situation and what you're trying to achieve it very well may not be. So if you're just looking for a way to charge recurring payments in WooCommerce you don't need memberships. But in short memberships allows you to restrict content on your site and assign things like discounts based on membership levels or plans that you create. Now there's again a lot of user role based pricing restriction plugins out there. Why memberships? So here's a comparison of memberships against groups for WordPress with the WooCommerce add-on. Now I actually recommend groups a lot and it's a great plugin. But for its integration with subscriptions memberships has us a lot more options. So there's so many more features that are hugely beneficial when using memberships and some of the ones that really stand out to me is the ability to grant access to an area of the site at user registered registration. So as soon as someone registers they can have access to restrictive content on the site. Remember all those new email types that were created when we installed subscriptions? There's going to be new ones that come with memberships too. So keeping the administrators and the customers in the loop as to what's going on. Another one is allowing for length based memberships. So in other words their memberships can't expire. And the amount of control what you have over what gets restricted in memberships. So it can be a post a category tag product category individual page product pretty much anything. You can restrict just the purchasing of certain products while still allowing your public to see it. So it's great for something like business and business. If you want to show products but you want to hide the pricing unless you're signed in as a member. Or you could do wholesale tiers. So depending on your membership level you'll get different pricing. And a huge thing that is not listed out here. Because there was actually another thing that I wanted to fit on one page is that memberships has the ability to import memberless via CSB. So you can import that into Mailchimp. Whatever your email marketing platform is. So memberships and subscriptions integration. In essence, memberships allows you to restrict content based on subscription. So what does this exactly mean? Remember that subscriptions really only enables recurring billing on your root commerce site. It does not restrict content. So when teamed up with subscriptions you can grant access to areas of your site based on a customer's subscription level. And you can allow access to different areas of their products, custom tax items, whatever. Depending on membership level and those memberships will have that recurring billing support of subscriptions. Another big thing with this for memberships in particular is it's able to use a free trial period when tied to a subscription product. And if the subscription uses a free trial, you can decide whether content should be included in that trial period or not. Subscription swishing we were talking about. Memberships also supports that upgrade or downgrade of membership and subscription plans. So when a subscription that is switched or suspended from your customer's My Account page the membership will also be switched that's tied along to it. And very briefly very briefly I'm just going to show you how this is done. So we're going to create a new membership plan. In this case it's only for customers who purchase that meatball pizza bowl subscription. So, slug. So granting access upon purchase, meatball pizza bowl. That's a subscription and it's going to be tied as a subscription money. On a side note has anyone actually had a meatball pizza bowl before? I wish. It's from Olive Garden. Hold on. I haven't had one but I really want to. I mean you know what's in it. I don't have to describe the ingredients. It's a meatball pizza bowl. But I've never met anyone who's actually had one. I'm not saying it. Why did they have? I don't know. I just want to know also why they created the first place. Like they went to KFC and they saw the bowl that KFC does and they're like, yep we're doing that. Well and Domino's hasn't done it yet? Yeah. The restrict content tab. I've added a restriction. So in this case I only want customers who have the super fan membership. Which is I remember tied to that meatball pizza bowl subscription to be able to access a particular page on my site called Superfans Only. So when you add a restriction rule for content it will no longer be public on your site. So by adding a rule for any page post exonomy it will be restricted and only can be accessed by members of this plan or members of another plan that grant specifically grant access to. Of course I can add other rules like like restricting products to be only seen or purchased by customers who have this membership or a big one is actually the ability to add different pricing tiers for different membership and subscription levels. So let's say like for $5 a month you see this pricing if you pay $10 a month you see a different pricing. But again for the sake of time I am going to admit all of that. I am trying to keep things simple. Once the membership is purchased the customer will have a new set of options and they are my account paid. This is the new memberships area. From here your customers will be able to manage and see the details of the membership like seeing what content or products have been unlocked for them as well as any product discounts. So when tied to a subscription like this one you can see the value of users to see the details of that subscription. So let's take a look at that page that super fans only play what it looks like for users customers who aren't members of the subscription. In this case I have configured memberships to show a message on restricted pages. Now you can also opt to completely hide the page. And by completely I mean it will 404. It will not show up in search engines it will not show up if you search your website it will not be indexed. So if you really want to hide content behind memberships or subscriptions that's the way to do it. In this case you can also set up a redirect so we'll take your fan to this if you try to go to this restricted page it's actually going to put you into the subscription title. But since we do have a subscription we're able to see the content which are the meatball pizza bowls. Look at that. That's a real thing. On the admin side you can see there's a lot of new information for members including one parent and subscription numbers are associated with the membership. And this is a miscellaneous side note for those of you who don't know. If you look at the order and subscription numbers for this membership they're order 90 and subscription number so it's something to remember about how wordpress works. Everything is essentially a different post, right? So if the subscription number I'm sorry, so a subscription number and a order number can not be the same. There are two separate posts. Now another example let's say I just received an order and it was order number 10 and in the meantime I published a couple new products and I put a new page up the next order I get will not be order number 11 will it be? So those new post types. So if this does bother you if this is just a way this is just how wordpress and lukana score work. If this does bother you there are extensions you can do to get sequential order numbers because it's sometimes tricky with accounting. There's a little FYI. So before I finish I want to take a minute to talk about a couple ways to extend the functionality of subscriptions and memberships. There's an extension that I really love called lukama subscription downloads it's actually developed by us at lukama and it allows you to associate downloadable products with an existing subscription. One of the best ones out there is called subscribe all the things. It's developed and maintained as a collaboration between prospress and somewhere warm. What's great about it number one it's free and it allows you to add subscription options non-subscription product types such as simple and variable products Additionally this plugin can be used to add subscription options to product bundles composite products the mix and match products offer options for subscribing to an entire part before checking out and switch any product from a one time purchase to a subscription even this has been added to a cart. So think about it as the subscribe and save on Amazon and that's free as long as you have subscription. There's teams for WooCommerce memberships developed by Skybridge as a paid extension and that takes the memberships created in WooCommerce and gives you the ability to sell them to teams or companies or groups and families instead of individuals so essentially you sell memberships on a team basis or per person basis so you can buy five memberships and you put in their email addresses and all five of them will have access to your content and finally I did bring this up earlier it's called follow ups it's developed by us at WooCommerce and it's a full on email marketing and you can send things like abandoned cart emails specific emails to customers who only purchase certain products or from a certain category and this has so many triggers it's insanely robust but in this case I like it because of the subscription specific triggers you can email a customer after renewal order has been created or before the next automatic payment and that works for manual renewals as well before active subscription expires and a ton more so this kind of goes hand in hand subscriptions and I think it's a really great product and that is it I would love to answer any questions if I can and if I don't know the answer I will say I don't know and I will find out for you what is the best way to test that once you've set everything up just to double check that do you mention subscription and membership kind of yeah so what I would do is can you repeat the question oh yeah sorry can you say what's the best way to test all this because there are some integrations first of all I've set it up on either state oh you do it on your website just make sure you have a payment gateway in test mode so you're not using any real money and then once you do that just set up something simple like a membership that renews every single day and for some brand new some brand new customer user that you've just created you can go from there that's really the simplest way that's what I would do yes did follow-ups work with WooCommerce? yes follow-ups is only for WooCommerce without the situation no no I'm sorry it works it works for WooCommerce subscriptions memberships it has tons of triggers and you can create your own custom triggers in there too so anything relating with WooCommerce follow-up and web search will replace jilt or clavio? I can't say it will replace them but it certainly has similar functionality any other questions? yeah this is probably more about the WooCommerce with the job board plug-in and you guys also the if you combine those you know if you do something like let's say happiness and WooCommerce and you want to look out there and see about other happiness in here but you don't want you're a supervisor so you're both you and your supervisor your supervisor is looking for more people like you but you don't want your supervisor to see you do you know if your functionality is in there or would that be an add-on? in that case so essentially I'm going to repeat also for me let's say we're going to I'm looking at a job board my boss can also see and I'm looking for new jobs that someone else is trying to look at so you're you're at you're at WooCommerce maybe you're looking at a position you're looking out there so you posted your resume for others to look at you're looking for happiness in here so these managers hiring officials are looking for people like you and your boss is looking for people like you because you're always growing to find your bosses to see yours so like what I would say is there to be a limit for anybody in your organization who can't see you're all rescued wow that would make me off the top of my head no I feel like if you got really creative with custom user roles you might be able to achieve be able to achieve something but I don't know off the top of my head I was trying to think of that as you were showing some of the modifications yeah I'm not sure off the top of my head that's a very very specific and that's a great question so I don't know let's see if I can find some notes yeah how you would use the team membership sure so give me an example of how to use teams for memberships so let's say on a membership page and I want to have five people I'm sorry I need to purchase five memberships if you're using teams for memberships what you're just going to do is bring up fields so you're going to put in information for those five people in those fields so now those five people are going to have access to that membership plan as opposed to just one person going through and buying it five times essentially so it's just making the process easier when you're dealing with multiple memberships like for in the sport field let's say let's say oh I'm buying let's say I'm selling business classes on my website and your company which comprises of 15 people is going to buy my business class we want to give all of them access to the products and to all this hidden content so that's why you can use something like teams for memberships and you'd pay 15 times or some discount so I'm out of time for questions about anything and when you're talking about pizza bowls I'll be down there thank you guys