How To Create A Subscription Box In Wordpress

If you're launching a subscription box business then you're going to want a website that makes it very easy for subscribers to sign up and start enjoying your products.

Thankfully, creating a website for a subscription box business is now very straightforward.

With just a few affordable tools, you can set up an online platform that gives you the ability to create one or more subscription plans. Once you've done that, visitors to your website can sign up and become paying subscribers, with their subscription fees collected online, via a range of different payment processors.

In this guide to creating a subscription box business in MemberPress, we'll show you exactly how to set up a WordPress website with all the necessary functionality.

Let's begin…

Building a Subscription Box Website with WordPress and MemberPress

When creating your subscription box business website, WordPress is the obvious choice. Not only is it possible to add all of the necessary features for a subscription box business to your website, but it can also be relatively inexpensive to launch your site.

If you've yet to start your business, WordPress is the ideal platform for testing your idea to see if it's viable.

If you decide that WordPress is the right platform for you, there are three main components required to build a subscription box website, so let's look at each of them now to help you get started.

Web Hosting and Domain Name

While WordPress is free to use, you will need to pay for web hosting and a domain name to get your website online.

Thankfully, there are some great value web hosts out there, many of whom will provide you with a domain name as part of your subscription.

If you've yet to launch your subscription box business and haven't built up an audience or started marketing your venture, then you can start off with an entry-level hosting plan that only costs a few dollars per month.

As your business gains popularity and your website receives more visitors, you'll need to upgrade to a higher performance hosting plan to maintain fast loading times. However, if you're just starting out, an entry-level shared hosting plan should allow you to test your business idea without too much financial investment.

A WordPress Theme

For your subscription box business to be successful, you'll need to turn as many of your website visitors into subscribers as possible. To do that, you'll need a website with a conversion-focused design.

One option is to hire someone to build a custom website to promote your business online. However, this approach can be expensive and time-consuming.

Instead, as you're using WordPress for your website, you can launch a professional-looking and effective website with a low-priced off-the-shelf set of templates.

Purchasing a WordPress theme like Divi gains you access to a huge library of easily editable templates for a wide range of projects, including lots of options for publishing landing pages. Furthermore, Divi comes with a split-testing tool that can help you optimize your website for higher conversion rates.

If you're on a tight budget, then a free alternative to Divi is the freemium Elementor plugin and its free WordPress theme.

A Suitable Subscription Box WordPress Plugin

Out of the box, WordPress doesn't have the necessary features to enable you to create a subscription business website, or at least not one that will let you collect payments from your customers on a recurring basis.

However, by installing a suitable plugin, you can quickly add the necessary functionality to your WordPress website. While there are a few plugins for WordPress that can help you with this, our MemberPress plugin has everything you need to launch and run a subscription box business with WordPress.

MemberPress isn't free, but if you want the ability to manage your subscribers and automatically collect recurring payments online, adding this essential functionality to your website is an expense your business should be able to justify.

Creating a Subscription Box Business in MemberPress

Now that you know what tools you need to build your website, let's take a look at creating a subscription box business in MemberPress.

Set up the Payment Options

With MemberPress installed on your WordPress website, the first step in creating your subscription box plan is configuring the payment options for your website. As MemberPress supports a number of payment gateways, you have a good range of options here.

Create a Subscription Membership Plan

Once you've set up a payment option, you'll need to create at least one membership. In MemberPress, memberships are the subscription plans that your customers can sign up for. If you want to offer multiple subscription box plans, you'll need to create a membership for each one.

While entering the name and the description for the membership, you can also choose whether the billing type will be recurring or a one-time payment.

As we're creating a membership for a subscription box business, choose the recurring option from the billing type drop-down menu on the Membership Terms panel. The interval drop-down menu lets you define how often the subscription recurs while the cost of the subscription can be entered in the price field.

Create a Trial Subscription Option

You can also create a trial period for a membership, such as allowing new subscribers to sign up at a reduced price for a set amount of time.

Customize Your Subscription Plans

On the Membership Options panel on the Add New Membership page, you can customize the plan further by setting up custom welcome emails, defining who can join this subscription, and entering the details that will be displayed in the price box for your plans.

Create a Membership Group

If you do create more than one plan for your subscription box business, you can use the MemberPress Groups feature to connect those plans together.

Doing this gives you the ability to generate a pricing table or price box that displays the grouped subscription options side by side. This makes it easy for your visitors to compare the subscription options and find the one that's best for them.

MemberPress has a good selection of color schemes that you can apply to the pricing tables to get them looking how you want. Alternatively, depending on your chosen WordPress theme, you might have access to some pre-built pricing table templates or a page builder tool that makes it easy to create your own price comparison tables.

Publish the Signup Forms

To simplify the process of displaying the signup forms on your site, the Group Options panel also includes the Group Price Boxes shortcodes. Copying and pasting these shortcodes into a post or page on your website allows you to display the signup options to your visitors.

Once the signup forms have been published, your visitors will be able to join your subscription box service.

Manage the Subscriptions

Once people start signing up, you can manage the subscribers from the Subscriptions section of the MemberPress plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you now have all the basics to get started and create your subscription box business in MemberPress.

Of course, you'll need to create the content that your subscribers will be getting access to, whether that's digital content accessible through your website or physical products you'll be shipping out.

However, as we've just seen, MemberPress has all the functionality required to help you create a website for your subscription box business.

If you'd like to know more about this topic, our guide on charging recurring monthly subscription fees for your membership site has additional information.

Are you ready to build your subscription box business website with MemberPress? Let us know in the comments below.

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