Looking to sell online courses, paid memberships, or other subscription products? There's a good chance you've discovered Webflow already - but how does Webflow approach subscriptions and recurring payments?
Webflow offers a subscription ecommerce solution only available to businesses who have enabled Ecommerce and Memberships on their sites and purchased an Ecommerce Site plan. Note that once you’ve enabled Ecommerce and Memberships, you can’t deactivate or remove it.
With this in mind, many Webflow website users choose our recurring billing integration to power their subscription business and accept recurring payments instead of using Webflow's standard checkout page.
How do they do this? By embedding the Subbly subscription checkout on their existing Webflow site — which our team can even help you install and configure for free!
What to know before using the Webflow Ecommerce and Memberships subscription feature
Webflow’s subscription billing option might not be for everyone. Before you upgrade to an Ecommerce Site plan, which is required before you can use it, this is what we think you should know.
Pros of Webflow
Webflow is popular because it allows you to build surprisingly sophisticated websites and branded experiences with minimal coding ability. Webflow sites are versatile, easy to manage, and great for people wanting to start a blog, a portfolio, or a business website. Webflow’s Ecommerce tools allow site operators to sell subscriptions as well as non subscription products, and feature support for custom user pages as well.
Transaction fees per purchase are low as well — 2% on the Standard plan ($29/month) and 0% on the Plus and Advanced plans ($74/month and $212/month respectively). Webflow even supports Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay and web payments as well.
Cons of Webflow
1. Complexity
To some extent, Webflow’s focus on simplicity makes it harder to create unique experiences by configuring individual subscription products or recurring payment plans exactly the way you need. To start with, the feature is permanent. As we mentioned, once it’s been activated, it can’t be deactivated. Webflow themselves even recommend creating a separate test site to experiment with the feature before committing to it outright. The analytics are also quite basic, with Webflow providing a general overview of sales statistics but little in-depth insight into customer lifetime value and payback period, for example.
2. Cadence
Webflow only offers a few different billing/shipping cadences - daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. This can restrict your options if you want to offer more flexible billing cycles to improve the customer experience. Webflow website operators often opt to use our embeddable subscription billing system for this exact feature. Read more about how you are able to use Subbly on your Webflow site here via our straightforward guide.
3. Cost
Pricing starts at $29 (billed monthly) for the cheapest plan that supports subscription ecommerce, and rises all the way up to $212/month for their advanced plan, all of which have a limit on the amount of total items you can add, unlike Subbly, which offers unlimited digital or physical products from our lowest tier plan. Even though their higher tier plans don’t charge for a transaction fee, payment gateway fees will still apply.
4. Depth of Support
Webflow provides email support from Monday to Friday, and mention on their website that they aim to respond personally within 24-48 hours. A detailed database of help articles and a community forum are also available. That being said, they don’t offer any 24/7 human support options that can get to the root of the problem through a quick conversation rather than asynchronous email messages.
5. Plugins
Webflow does allow for their standard subscription ecommerce functionality to be extended by 3rd-party extensions, including SubscriptionFlow and SimpleSubscriptions, among other systems. However, if you decide to integrate with one of them, you'll need to remember that as they're not developed by Webflow, they might not always be 100% stable all the time, on top of adding additional costs to your monthly bill.
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