WooCommerce Subscriptions in product feeds

Selling subscription products and not sure they make it into your shopping feed? It’s a fair worry. Many custom product types get skipped by feed plugins, or their price comes through wrong. The good news: Product Feed Pro includes your subscription products automatically, with no extra setup. This guide explains how that works, which price ends up in your feed, and how to send the Subscription cost attribute to Google Shopping.

Prerequisites

How subscription products appear in your feed

Product Feed Pro detects your subscription products automatically and exports them to your feed. It reads the title, description, link, image, and your custom WooCommerce attributes exactly the way it does for a simple product. This works for both single subscription products and variable subscription products. So you don’t need to rebuild your subscriptions as plain products to get them into a feed.

The price is where subscriptions differ. Your feed sends the recurring price, the amount a customer pays each billing cycle. It does not send the signup fee, since shopping channels expect the ongoing price of the item.

A variable subscription works differently. To get any of its plans into your feed, open the feed’s General tab and turn on Include product variations. Your feed then lists each plan as its own item with its own recurring price. Without this setting, variable subscription plans don’t appear in the feed.

The WooCommerce Subscriptions extension must be active for the recurring price to calculate correctly. If it’s deactivated, the product isn’t recognised as a subscription, and its price may be empty or wrong in the feed.

What subscription data appears in your feed

Subscription products carry the same core fields as your other products:

• Title, description, link, and image pulled from the product itself.
• Price, regular price, and sale price are taken from the recurring subscription price. When a regular price and a lower current price both exist, the plugin sends the lower one as the sale price.
• Custom WooCommerce attributes you’ve added to the product.
• Subscription cost for Google Shopping, when you map it (see below).

So you map subscription products to your channel’s attributes exactly like any other product, on the Field Mapping tab.

Add the Subscription cost attribute for Google Shopping

Google Shopping can show the billing period and recurring price of a subscription in a dedicated subscription cost field. With Product Feed Elite and WooCommerce Subscriptions both active, Product Feed Pro fills this in for you in the exact format Google expects. You add it through Field Mapping.

To map it:

1. Go to Product Feed in your WordPress admin menu.
2. Open your Google Shopping feed, or create a new one.
3. Click the Field Mapping tab.
4. Click Add field mapping to add a new row.
5. In the channel attributes column, select Subscription cost.
6. In the Value dropdown next to it, select Subscription cost (Google).
7. Click Save Changes to store your mapping.
8. Click Generate Product Feed to refresh the feed with the new value.

The value comes through in Google’s required format. For an XML Google Shopping feed, a $50 monthly plan produces nested child elements:

<g:subscription_cost>
  <g:period>month</g:period>
  <g:period_length>1</g:period_length>
  <g:amount>50.00 USD</g:amount>
</g:subscription_cost>

Here, period is the billing cycle (week, month, or year), period_length is the total number of billing periods the customer commits to (where 1 means cancel-anytime), and amount is the recurring price with its ISO currency code. The amount follows the same tax and currency settings as the rest of your products.

The Subscription cost (Google) value only appears when Product Feed Elite and WooCommerce Subscriptions are both active. If you don’t see it in the Value dropdown, check that both are installed and activated.

Subscription cost for “subscribe and save” products (APFS)

Subscription cost isn’t limited to true WooCommerce Subscriptions products. A regular WooCommerce product can carry one or more subscription schemes through All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions (APFS): the “subscribe and save” style setup. Product Feed Elite fills in the Subscription cost for both product shapes:

• True subscription product: the entire product is a subscription. It behaves as documented above.
• Regular product with APFS schemes: the product itself isn’t a subscription, but one or more subscription options are attached to it.

If a product offers several subscription schemes, your feed doesn’t export all of them. It uses the product’s own default scheme when that default is itself one of the schemes attached directly to the product. Otherwise, it falls back to whichever of the product’s own schemes comes first. Either way, only one scheme’s billing terms end up in your feed, not every option the customer can choose.

A scheme using override pricing sends the product’s regular/feed price rather than a separately calculated subscription price.

A variable parent product with APFS schemes is skipped, the same way a variable subscription parent is (see above). Its price is WooCommerce’s synced cheapest-variation price, not a single recurring cost. The individual variations carry the real value.

This only applies when the All Products for WooCommerce Subscriptions integration is active: either bundled with WooCommerce Subscriptions 9 or later, or the older standalone All Products for Subscriptions plugin. Without it active, these products are treated as regular products, and the Subscription cost isn’t populated for them. There’s no feed setting to change it, since this depends entirely on whether APFS is active on the store.

Troubleshooting

FAQ

Need more help?

If you’re on Product Feed Elite, open a support ticket, and our team will help you map subscription attributes or troubleshoot how your subscriptions appear in the feed.

If you’re on the free version, post your question in the Product Feed Pro support forum on WordPress.org.