Given the rise of subscription boxes, online publications, and e-businesses in general, being able to easily enable recurring payments for your WooCommerce site is quite handy. However, this task becomes tricker to accomplish when your audience prefers a currency and payment gateway other than USD and Stripe or PayPal.
Fortunately, you can now set up recurring WooCommerce payments in Korean won through the NHN KCP payment gateway. The Korea for WooCommerce plugin and its NHN KCP add-on paired with the official WooCommerce Subscriptions extension make the process simple and straightforward.
In this post, I’ll discuss the benefits of being able to offer recurring payments on your WooCommerce sites, and the challenges of doing so for Korean customers. Then I’ll walk you through how to use Korea for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions to enable this functionality. Let’s dive in!
Why you may want to set up recurring WooCommerce Korean Payments
When it comes to running an e-commerce site, securing a steady stream of revenue can be a challenge. With so many buying options available to online shoppers, it’s easy for them to make one-time purchases on your site and then move on.
One way to bring in more reliable income for your business is to offer recurring payments for products or services. This may include:
- Subscriptions for premium content
- Ongoing and regular services, such as consulting
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Monthly product subscription boxes
- Automated product refills for necessities such as toiletries or pet food ?⬛
By offering subscriptions to your customers, you don’t have to hope that they come back to your store when they need a product or service you provide. This also decreases the amount of effort you have to put into retargeting existing customers.
Best of all, recurring payments can help you better predict what your business’ revenue will be from month to month. Just by looking at your list of subscriptions, you should be able to estimate how much income you’ll bring in over the next few weeks.
All that said, if your site has an international audience, it’s important for your customers to be able to make recurring payments in their preferred currencies. Setting up payment gateways that are familiar to your shoppers can also help improve your store’s User Experience (UX), which often translates to more sales.
WooCommerce Subscriptions is the official extension for adding recurring payments to your WooCommerce site. Up until recently, it wasn’t compatible with NHN KCP, a top payment gateway in South Korea.
This was a significant barrier to online retailers selling to Korean consumers. So, I’ve been working closely with NHN KCP to make it compatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions – a first for a Korean payment system.
How to set up recurring WooCommerce Korean Payments (in 4 Steps)
If you’re ready to start offering subscriptions to your Korean customers, all you need is a quality product or service and a few key plugins. The process is very simple, and similar to that of enabling recurring payments for Stripe.
Here’s how to make recurring WooCommerce Korean payments a reality on your site.
Step 1: Install and Activate the Required Plugins
First, there are a handful of plugins you’ll need to install to set up recurring Korean payments:
- WooCommerce. Presumably you already have an online store. However, if that’s not the case, or if you’re using an e-commerce plugin other than WooCommerce, you’ll need to install, activate, and configure it.
- Korea for WooCommerce. This is my WooCommerce extension, which makes it possible to set up Korean payment gateways for your online store.
- WooCommerce Subscriptions. Finally, you’ll need to purchase WooCommerce Subscriptions and upload it to your WordPress site to install it.
You’ll also need to activate the NHN KCP add-on for Korea for WooCommerce, and have an NHN KCP account.
Step 2: Add NHN KCP as a Payment Method
Once all the plugins are activated, navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments and toggle on the NHN KCP – Credit Card option:
Then save your changes.
Step 3: Create a subscription product and set its price
Next, create a subscription-based product. You can do so by carrying out the usual steps for creating a WooCommerce product and selecting either Simple Subscription or Variable Subscription from the Product type dropdown:
You can then set the subscription price and specify how often it should renew:
Additionally, you can use the settings here to add a one-time fee that will be applied when customers sign up, or to configure a free trial.
Step 4: Publish your subscription product and start raking in recurring WooCommerce Korean Payments
After you’ve published your subscription product, customers will be able to add it to their carts and select Credit Card as their payment method at checkout:
When they confirm their information, they’ll see a popup window where they can enter their payment information agree to the terms of your subscription:
Customers can also choose to save their credit card information and sign up for automatic renewals, enabling them to maintain their subscriptions without having to take any extra steps. Once they confirm their information, you should be able to see their subscription in your dashboard by navigating to WooCommerce > Subscriptions:
Here you can manage subscriptions much like you would regular purchases on the WooCommerce Orders screen.
Conclusion
Enabling recurring payments for your customers can be a huge boost to your online business. However, up until now, this functionality wasn’t available for popular Korean payment systems such as NHN KCP. I’ve been working with this platform to make it compatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions, and have already started developing integrations for other Korean payments gateways as well.
For now, you can set up recurring WooCommerce Korean payments in just four steps:
- Install WooCommerce, Korea for WooCommerce and its NHN KCP add-on, and WooCommerce Subscriptions.
- Enable NHN KCP as a payment method.
- Create a subscription product and set its price.
- Publish your subscription product and start selling.
Do you have any questions about recurring Korean payments in WooCommerce? Let me know in the comments section below!
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