WooCommerce: Subscriptions

Recently we purchased the WooCommerce module for subscription products. Our application uses the Swipe payment gateway which does not allow automatic recurring payments so we ticked the box to enable manual renewals.

Some of our products have a free trial period. When we were testing the whole subscription process we discovered the purchase did’t work. The checkout displayed the correct price ($0), however, it selected the payment gateway even though no payment was necessary at that moment. The purchase could not be completed as the gateway returned error … my guess is it could not process the $0 payment which make sense.

We didn’t know why that was happening. Two people spent 3-4 hours each investigating how to resolve the issue. At some point I found in the module’s documentation it collected the payment data at checkout for all the subscriptions even if no payment was to be made. The solution was very simple … to tick the box disabling the automatic renewals.