In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, staying ahead of the competition often means adapting to the ever-evolving needs and demands of customers. For online businesses, providing subscription-based services has become an increasingly popular strategy to enhance customer loyalty and generate recurring revenue.
When OPRL, a leading eCommerce company, decided to transition its subscription model to WooCommerce, they faced the daunting task of migrating their existing subscriptions seamlessly without disrupting their valued customer base.
That’s when they reached out to us.
So, today we bring to you the story of one of our clients. and how we helped them with WooCommerce subscription migration.
An environmental labeling and certification scheme, OPRL a.k.a the On-Pack-Recycling-Label is a not-for-profit supporting consumer recycling of packaging by giving simple, clear, and consistent advice on-pack and supporting improved packaging design and procurement.
They were the world’s first scheme to create a label that provides consumers with reliable and consistent information about what is and isn’t collected for recycling.
This internationally cited, award-winning scheme brings together retailers, brands, packers/fillers, packaging designers and manufacturers, compliance schemes, local authorities, and the recycling industry.
Our client, David Luther, the director of Tinker Tailor Designs, works with OPRL. He was our POC for this project and helped a lot in keeping us and OPRL on the same page at every step of the journey.
Since OPRL used XERO for eCommerce functionalities, they now wanted to migrate to WooCommerce.
They needed help with the following:-
– Export-Import of Users (& Groups) while also retaining their passwords
– Migration of subscriptions
– Migration of subscription data for GoCardless
Since our client needed help in migrating data and subscriptions to WooCommerce, we went with the following approach:-
Export-Import of Users (& Groups) – Retain Passwords:-
Users with their passwords needed to be migrated from the old site to the new one. We used the WP All Import/Export’s Migrate user feature to transfer users as our client had the Pro license. All users became subscribers instead of the two new roles created earlier.
The client was maintaining groups and content access manually by maintaining who was the parent user and who was the child user. They wanted to start using WooCommerce Memberships and Teams for WooCommerce Memberships to achieve this.
For migrating groups, firstly we created all users and subscriptions for their parent users. The child member user meta contained the parent’s email to identify which group they were a part of. We created a script that would scan the subscriptions and detect which subscriptions needed teams and then created teams for them. Then, a script was created to map parent users as owners of their corresponding teams and child users as the members of these teams.
This allowed team owners to take control of who is and is not a part of their team. And allowed the client to restrict content to these teams with the help of Membership plans created with WooCommerce Memberships.
Migration of subscriptions:-
For this, we used WooCommerce subscriptions. We created an import file containing all the relevant details as expected in the WooCommerce Subscription Import/Export script.
With help from the client team, we mapped the data of all relevant subscriptions and their products for the WooCommerce Subscriptions to renew correctly in the future. For most cases, we had discussed that it would be manual renewals for the subscription.
Migration of subscription data for GoCardless:-
WordPress has something known as ‘meta’ that GoCardless uses to store subscription details and maintain payments. After digging into the GoCardless code, we were able to isolate these data points and replicate them during our migration to ensure a smooth migration experience.
One of the main challenges we faced was when we were working on the migration of subscription data for GoCardless. Since we had never worked with GoCardless before, we were not sure if our initial approach would work. But fortunately, it worked out.
We also cross-checked it with the team at GoCardless as well as WooCommerce and they even helped us whenever we needed guidance. Additionally, our POC, Luther, helped a lot in ensuring that all teams including GoCardless, WooCommerce, OPRL, and WisdmLabs were on the same page.
