PayTabs WooCommerce Integration: Supporting Subscription Businesses in MENA

To sell online in MENA, WooCommerce merchants require payment gateways that are compatible with local payment networks and regulations. PayTabs is a globally renowned gateway that has a strong presence in the Middle East. The only problem is that WooCommerce and PayTabs don’t have a direct connection which makes things complex for merchants.

Luckily, SubscriptionFlow offers this missing link, connecting subscription stores to a seamless recurring payment infrastructure. PayTabs becomes your payment processor while SubscriptionFlow acts as your subscription management architecture. This two-in-one integration solution sets WooCommerce merchants up for scale.

Why WooCommerce & PayTabs Is a Powerful Combo

The WooCommerce-PayTabs combo works for a variety of reasons:

Easy store-building

WooCommerce offers an easy store-building platform which doesn’t require technical expertise. Anyone can launch a store there and start selling subscription products. However, selling subscriptions also requires a dedicated architecture which will be covered in the subsequent sections.

Regional coverage with PayTabs

Having global payment gateways is nice, but they don’t always support regional payment requirements. For example, tax laws and local payment methods. PayTabs is deeply integrated with MENA’s financial infrastructure and local banks. Due to this, recurring payment success rates increase for the merchants in this region, and they get to face fewer declines.

Multi-currency & Arabic language support

PayTabs supports the currencies used in the Middle East and North Africa. It also supports Arabic for merchant dashboards and customer-facing communications. Thanks to this, subscription payments are easy to localize, and charges are easier for clients to understand. Standard currency charges, such as in USD, can be less clear and unstable as currency conversion rates keep fluctuating.

Local payment methods

MADA is Saudi Arabia’s national debit card network, and PayTabs supports it. This is critical for merchants as they can accept these debit cards without any friction. Additionally, PayTabs also supports other locally prevalent payment methods so there’s no shortage of options for customers.

Regional Compliance

Another perk of using PayTabs with WooCommerce is that the gateway is compliant with the regional payment laws. This means that merchants don’t have to put in extra effort to chase after compliance.

All of these perks are great; however, they still don’t fill in one important gap that every subscription business faces. And that is the need for an infrastructure that supports recurring payments and offers subscription lifecycle management.

This takes us to our next section:

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The Real Challenge: Managing Recurring Payments at Scale

PayTabs offers a great payment processing solution for MENA businesses. But that’s all it does. Merchants can’t use this gateway for managing their subscriptions, because that’s not what it is built for.

All the benefits of PayTabs WooCommerce integration highlighted above suit businesses with one-time transactions better. Recurring payment businesses need more than that to thrive. These are the problems subscription-based stores have to face, with only a gateway and no subscription management platform:

• Card expiries and payment failures

Even with a gateway as nice as PayTabs, card expiries can’t be prevented. The same goes for payment failures due to other reasons. When a payment fails, it’s necessary to retry it. But there’s no such mechanism in WooCommerce or PayTabs natively.

• Multiple plans

Subscription stores commonly offer more than one plan. But what happens without automation? Everything gets all over the place. Customers and their plans are tracked in spreadsheets. Also, since each plan differs in pricing, there are various charge calculations to be performed by hand.

• Upgrade and downgrade flows

If there are different plan options, upgrades and downgrades make sense. Customers can move between plans at will. But transferring a customer from one plan to another also needs changes at the billing level. Charges may need to be adjusted (known as proration) and refunds may need to be applied.

• Different billing durations

Multiple billing durations often run at the same time. For instance, monthly and annual. These involve different billing amounts and charging dates. Without an expert platform, these also need manual tracking and calculations.

• Invoicing

Another great complication businesses face is having to create invoices by hand. For ten monthly customers, this seems like nothing. But as soon as the customer count passes 50 (or less), manual invoice generation becomes a nightmare.

• Reporting

WooCommerce has basic reporting options, good for one-time sales but not recurring transactions. Merchants need to monitor their recurring revenue, recurring payment success and failure rates, and customer activity to get the full picture of their business performance.

Adding SubscriptionFlow to the Stack

SubscriptionFlow offers you the missing link in the WooCommerce PayTabs integration i.e. effortless subscription management. The platform not only enables this integration in the first place; it also makes it subscription-ready.

SubscriptionFlow is easy to connect with WooCommerce and PayTabs individually. When it’s connected with both, it becomes the connection point between WooCommerce and PayTabs as well. What this means is that SubscriptionFlow:

• Lets customers purchase from WooCommerce and get their subscription cycles managed in SubscriptionFlow
• Allows WooCommerce transactions to be processed through PayTabs
• Enables automatic recurring payments through PayTabs

With this setup, WooCommerce stores in MENA get access to:

Subscription lifecycle management

Why keep data in spreadsheets when it can be stored on a centralized, intuitive and easy-to-access dashboard. Your customers’ entire data and subscription lifecycle updates can be viewed from SubscriptionFlow’s dashboards. Merchants can see automation in action as their customer renewals take place on their own, and their plan changes are prorated automatically.

Intelligent dunning

Smart dunning features make payment failures less intimidating. When you activate payment retries in SubscriptionFlow, they are routed through PayTabs as well. With retries, pending amounts can be collected much faster compared to manual customer communication.

Automatic Invoicing

Automated invoicing takes half your burden away. Merchants don’t have to create invoices for the same customer over and over for their ongoing subscription payments. They can hand this task over to SubscriptionFlow entirely, and enjoy consistent invoice generation and automatic invoice delivery to clients.

Advanced reporting features

SubscriptionFlow gives you the reporting features absent in WooCommerce. It offers all the analytics a subscription business needs, whether its monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, plan-level progress, active subscriptions, churn rate or more.

Multi-plan architecture

Merchants can actually treat subscription plans like proper plans, rather than simple products as WooCommerce does. Multiple plans are supported by SubscriptionFlow checkout, and the software divides customers into accurate plan segments in its database. Whether it’s just one plan and billing duration, or many, SubscriptionFlow automates charges with equal ease.

Hybrid billing models

Design different billing models based on the pricing strategy you have in mind. Merchants can implement the simple, flat-rate charges, bundled product charges, pay-as-you-go-pricing or tiered charges—any model they like. They can set up more than one billing model too. Each billing model charges differently, and these differing payment amounts are smoothly routed through PayTabs at fixed intervals.

Who Can Use This Setup

The PayTabs WooCommerce integration enabled with SubscriptionFlow can be used by any and every subscription-based business. Preferably the stores operating in MENA, as PayTabs adds the most value in that region. Merchants don’t need to belong to a specific industry to benefit from this setup, they can sell anything as long as its subscription-based:

• Memberships
• Online courses
• Subscription boxes
• Digital content
• SaaS services

All of these services can be sold on a recurring basis with SubscriptionFlow, and their payments be accepted via PayTabs. Even businesses selling a mixture of one-time and recurring products can use this integration. This payment infrastructure is perfect for growing businesses in MENA as it scales effortlessly with subscription volume.

Use SubscriptionFlow to connect your WooCommerce store with PayTabs & start your growth journey in MENA today.