A subscriptions migration that found the renewals were never automatic

The brief

The store sold course subscriptions through RightPress Subscriptio, alongside Sensei Pro, AffiliateWP, a HubSpot integration and per-product currencies. The owner wanted to move to WooCommerce Subscriptions while keeping every subscriber and their automatic, pre-approved recurring payments.

Checking the assumption first

A migration like this usually means moving stored payment agreements from one plugin to another. So before converting anything, we looked at the payment gateways themselves. In Stripe, every subscription payment was a single payment, with no recurring billing profile behind it. The owner, who had set the store up years earlier, believed renewals were automatic. He ran his own test with a one-day subscription through both Stripe and PayPal, and it confirmed the finding on both.

That changed the job. There were no billing agreements to carry over, so a straight migration would have created subscriptions that looked automatic and never charged anyone.

What we did instead

We converted every existing subscription to WooCommerce Subscriptions so the records, dates and customers were preserved, then set up renewal emails for existing subscribers, following a flow agreed with the owner on a call, so they move onto genuine recurring billing through WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Results

• Every subscriber moved to a maintained, supported plugin.
• A long-standing misunderstanding about the store's revenue found before it caused a problem.
• Renewals that are automatic from now on, for real.

Client name and site withheld at our discretion. Details are taken from the project record.