If you’re using WooCommerce Memberships, Teams for WooCommerce Memberships, and WooCommerce Subscriptions together, it’s important to understand how WooCommerce Teams subscription switching can affect your store’s memberships.
When you or a team owner upgrades or downgrades a subscription, a new team is created instead of updating the existing team. This can cause frustration—especially when managing hundreds or even thousands of team members. Let’s walk through why this happens and what you can do about it.
How the plugins work together
- WooCommerce Memberships lets you control access to content, products, or services based on a customer’s membership.
- Teams for WooCommerce Memberships allows you to sell memberships to groups, like businesses, schools, or clubs. A designated team owner manages billing and invites members.
- WooCommerce Subscriptions adds recurring billing to your store, so memberships can renew automatically over time.
While these plugins work together in many ways, Teams for WooCommerce Memberships is not compatible with subscription switching at this time.
What is subscription switching?
Subscription switching lets customers move between subscription plans—for example, upgrading from a Basic Membership to a Pro Membership. When a customer switches plans, WooCommerce Subscriptions creates a new subscription tied to the new product or pricing tier.
Since Teams for WooCommerce Memberships doesn’t currently recognize switched subscriptions as linked to the original team, this causes problems when managing team memberships.
What happens when you switch a team’s subscription?
When you or a team owner switches to a different membership plan:
- A new subscription is created
- A new team is automatically created alongside it
- Existing team members are not transferred to the new team
This means you’ll need to manually re-add all members to the new team. For small teams, this might not be a major issue. But for larger teams with hundreds or thousands of members, it can quickly become tedious and frustrating.
What you can do
If you offer subscription switching, it’s important to be aware of this limitation. Currently, the best way to manage this situation is by manually reconnecting the new team to the new subscription. While this process can be tedious for large teams, it ensures that memberships remain properly linked.
To manually reconnect team members:
1. Move existing memberships under the new team.
This ensures that the team members retain their membership benefits without having to individually re-purchase or re-enroll.
- Go to WooCommerce > Memberships > Teams and click Add New.
- Set the team name. The team owner can change the team name later.
- In the Team Details section, set the owner and other team settings.
- In the Billing Details section, you can designate the team membership product, which is important if you want owners to be able to renew the team’s access.
- Click Update.
2. Create the new subscription manually for the team owner. (Follow WooCommerce’s guide for manually creating subscriptions.) If you’re creating a per-member priced team, make sure the subscription quantity and price match the desired number of seats.
3. Manually create a new team and link it to the newly created subscription.
