Group Subscriptions Management in Wix Made Possible

Subscriptions no longer have to be restricted to individual users. Along with the one-plan per user model, businesses today are also increasingly adopting group subscription models. In these models, a single subscription account is tied to several users to grant them shared access.

Despite the growing popularity of group subscriptions, they’re not yet natively supported by ecommerce sites such as Wix. Absence of native group subscription management prevents Wix merchants from taking advantage of this model.

The good news? This barrier is now being lifted. Merchants can connect with SubscriptionFlow from the Wix App Market, and use this software to offer and manage group subscriptions effortlessly. Read on to learn more.

Why Group Subscriptions Are On the Rise?

A group subscription serves the needs of multiple users through a single account. User groups include families, colleagues, student teams, employee departments, and more. At times they require access to the same product or software—an access that they can share.

In many contexts, sharing a subscription is way more convenient than signing up separately. In some cases, it’s not only convenient, but also necessary. Imagine families. In a family, there are people belonging to various age groups. Realistically, not all of them are capable of paying and maintaining their individual subscription.

Yet they all require service access, so what’s the solution? They rely on any one individual to pay for them, and manage their account. Think about the family streaming plans Netflix offers. One user pays, while others enjoy smooth access.

Similarly, there are many other scenarios where group subscriptions make the most sense. For example, companies needing multiple snack boxes for their employees every month, but under one account. Hence, the scope is substantial, and merchants don’t have to miss out on it just because of Wix’s limitations.

What Wix Doesn’t Support

Wix lets merchants accept recurring payments, and offers basic tools for managing regular subscriptions. But when it comes to group subscriptions, it doesn’t support them at all. So merchants have no way of setting up such plans, and managing multiple members under each plan.

These are some shortcomings that they have to deal with:

• Subscriptions tied to single users only

One subscription plan can be activated for one customer only. Customers can’t share their subscriptions with other users. There’s simply no option for the merchant to allocate different user seats or licenses to a single plan.

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• No role based access can be created

In group subscriptions, there are two basic roles assigned to users. The admin and the member. The user that subscribes to the group plan, provides their payment details, and pays becomes the admin. All the other users become members that access the service. But in Wix, there’s no option to create any such roles under a subscription.

• No way of providing group access to a service

Group subscribers typically get access to their separate self-service portals that are connected to the admin account. They can make basic changes to their profile using those portals, and may set up their own service access passcodes. Wix doesn’t support multi-member portals or passcode-based access for more than one user.

• Merchants have to enable a separate subscription for each user

Since shared access isn’t possible, if teams require collective subscription, merchants have to create a separate account for each user. This can be demanding as merchants have to collect recurring payments from every account, instead of just the admin’s.

Moreover, if the team admin wants to change their payment method, then the merchant would have to manually do that for every user’s account. That’s because the admin still pays for every user, only that the payment is fragmented, and not deducted as a whole, as would happen in a proper group subscription.

Group Subscriptions Need Specialized Management

These are some key subscription management features that merchants require for smooth-functioning group subscriptions:

• Centralized invoicing and billing

Billing has to be tied to the admin account. This means that the merchant needs to generate a comprehensive bill and charge it to the admin. This bill or invoice contains the total charges of all the members in the group. It ensures that the merchant doesn’t have to charge the admin separately for each member by creating separate invoices.

• Role-based access

The roles of admins and members are important without which the subscription cannot work. There must always be one fixed account responsible for paying. Groups, such as corporations or schools, can have more complicated needs and may require more than just these two roles. They may want to create more roles with different access permissions.

• Upgrade/downgrade support

An admin may want to add more members to the plan, or remove members from it. And they might need to do that mid-cycle. For these scenarios, merchants must keep their proration tools ready for adjusting charges so that the plan can instantly be upgraded or downgraded.

• Advanced portal for admin

Admins need a portal where they can manage their subscription, and monitor the sub-accounts of their members too. This is especially needed to track the usage of each member if the subscription service is online. For example, access to online courses where merchants charge per lesson.

How SubscriptionFlow Makes Your Group Subscription Dream Come True

SubscriptionFlow, available as a Wix app, makes it possible for merchants to offer group subscriptions. Merchants can use its custom checkout to get new subscribers on board, and then manage their subscriptions inside SubscriptionFlow.

With this app, they don’t have to limit themselves to Wix’s basic subscription management tools. They can simply create a group subscription product in SubscriptionFlow, sync that to their Wix store, and start onboarding new sign ups.

When any customer signs up, the software activates their subscription, assigns them the admin role, and lets them add other users to the plan via the admin portal. All of this takes place automatically, and instantly.

Merchants can leverage all these features to manage their group subscriptions expertly:

• One bill per group

One comprehensive invoice is generated for the entire group and transferred to the group admin. It lists each member’s charge, if the charges are different for all due to usage-based billing. Alternatively, if the billing is seat-based (there’s a fixed price for each user seat), then the invoice can list the total number of active seats and the corresponding total charge.

• Automated billing cycles

Payment collection can also be automated. Meaning, the admin account is charged accurate amounts at the start of every billing cycle. They can be sent their group invoice after they are charged. In this case, invoices work like receipts. Moreover, the system can also generate invoice copies to send each group member their own copy of the shared invoice.

• Shared portals for members

Self-service portals don’t have to be restricted to admins only. With SubscriptionFlow, they can be shared across members too. What this means is that for a group, all its members’ profiles can be linked within a single portal.

And any member can access this portal to make changes to their own profile. This ensures that members don’t have to request the admin to make basic changes for them all the time. They can control their settings themselves, making their experience more smooth and put-together.

• Automatic proration

Members can be added or removed from the group subscription by the admin anytime. For example, you can create a plan which can have 3-10 members. The plan’s price can scale upward or downward according to the number of members using it.

Even if members join or leave in the middle of a billing cycle, SubscriptionFlow can still prorate the plan’s total charge and make it instantly applicable.

• Real-time usage monitoring

Merchants can enable usage-based billing for customers. In that case, each customer’s charge can be calculated according to their own usage. Group admins can be given the option to view their members’ usage in their portal so that they can anticipate and manage their charges.

• Custom roles

For those groups that have complex service access needs, custom roles can be set up. For instance, roles like editor, reviewer, professor, and student can be set up. These roles can have their own set of permissions, and specify how each user may interact with the service. Merchants can manage role-based access seamlessly in SubscriptionFlow.

Want group subscriptions on your Wix store? Connect with SubscriptionFlow, and start onboarding subscriber groups instantly.