Now that we know how to add products to our store and customize the way it looks and is organized, it's time to branch out and look at how we can sell things other than t-shirts. Being able to bill someone every week, month, or year is incredibly challenging on a technical level. Many e-commerce platforms can't do it at all and the ones that do usually have high monthly fees and limitations. The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin is phenomenally good at selling memberships and runs entirely on your own website, so you don't have to pay monthly fees.

Once you start billing people regularly, you can set up all types of membership sites: sites that have special pricing for members, sites that only allow members to purchase items, sites where members get access to premium content, and, of course subscription websites that will send users a package every week, month, or year.

The vast majority of the recipes in this chapter require the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin (http://www.woothemes.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/), which is a premium extension for WooCommerce, to be installed and activated. Recurring billing is very complex and not all payment gateways work with Subscriptions. It's worth reading through the documentation located at http://docs.woothemes.com/document/subscriptions/payment-gateways/#section-1 to make sure your payment gateway is compatible. Both Simplify Commerce and PayPal Standard, which are included in the WooCommerce core, are compatible with Subscriptions.